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Mary Whiton Calkins, whom is best known for two things: becoming the first woman president of the American Psychological Association and being denied her doctorate from Harvard. However, these two aspects only make up a small portion of what she accomplished in her life. Her entire life was dedicated to her work, especially the development of her "psychology of selves." She founded an early psychology laboratory and invented the paired-associate technique. She passionately delved into the new field of Psychology but also was highly active in the field of Philosophy. She was not deterred by being a woman and used her struggles to gain a voice to speak out against women's oppression.
Mary Whiton Calkins was born on March 30, 1863 in Hartford, Connecticut. Her father was Wolcott Calkins and a Presbyterian minister. She was from a close knit family, especially to her mother, and the eldest of five children. In 1880, when she was seventeen, she moved to Newton, Massachusetts where her family built a home that she lived in the rest of her life. Her father, knowing the education that women received, decided to design and supervise Mary's education. This enabled her to enter Smith College in 1882 with advanced standing as a sophomore. However, in 1893, an "experience which permanently influenced her thinking and character" occurred with the death of her sister Maude. The following academic year she stayed home and took private lessons. She reentered Smith College in the fall of 1884 as a senior and graduated with a concentration in classics and philosophy.
In 1886 her family went to Europe for sixteen months. This is where she broadened her knowledge of the classics. Upon returning to Massachusetts her father arranged an interview for Mary with the President of Wellesley College, a liberal arts college for women that was a few miles from their home. She was offered a position there as a tutor in Greek and began teaching in the fall of 1887. Mary remained in the Greek Department for three years. However a professor in the Department of Philosophy noticed her talent of teaching. He discussed with Mary the position needed to teach the new field of Psychology, which was still a sub discipline of Philosophy. Due to the scarcity of women in that era it made it realistic to see her potential and offer her the position. The motto for the time was to "find the right person and preparation can be discussed later."
The only requirement that the professor had was that Calkins studyfor one year in a Psychology program. However, she faced two problemsmeeting this condition. The first being that there were few psychologydepartments in 1890. Secondly, getting admitted to these places thatdid offer the program was highly unlikely since she was a woman. Herfirst consideration was to study abroad. An instructor at Smith toldher that her best chance was to try obtaining "private instruction inpsychology and philosophy at any of the German universities outside ofZurich" (Furumoto, 1980). However, another instructor told her thatwould be a good idea "if ladies had been allowed the same privileges asmen" (1980). Calkins formally dismissed going to Germany when shereceived a letter from a woman student attending the University ofGottingen which stated, "I wish I might encourage you; but pastexperience has proved to me the utter uselessness of trying to enlightenthe authorities, at least, in our generation."
Once Calkins started looking at the United States she discoveredthat the University of Michigan, where she would be studying under JohnDewey, and Yale, where she would be studying under G.T. Ladd, werepromising. However, she received a letter from another woman studentthat dissuaded her. The letter stated, "Personally, I should beimmensely glad if you would come. We might be able to get somedelightful work together...By the way Prof. Ladd thinks you ought tohave some lady with you at the lectures. If there were only one or twoother girls who would come to join us, we could get a tremendousamount..."(1980). She decided against both universities, most likelybecause they were further away from home that she would like and theydid not have a psychological laboratory.
However, one of the few universities that did have a laboratory wasHarvard. Two professors their, William James and Josiah Royce, had sentCalkins letters inviting her to "sit-in" on their lectures on a strictlyinformal basis. When Calkins requested that she be allowed to sit-in onthese lectures, President Eliot refused stating that her presence atthese lectures would receive an angry reaction from the governing bodyat Harvard. However, Calkins father wrote a petition to Harvardrequesting that his daughter be granted admission to these lectures. Inaddition the President of Wellesley College wrote a letter stating thatCalkins was a member of their faculty and that this program suited herneeds.
On October 1, 1890 Harvard approved the petition. Calkins waspermitted to attend the seminars of James and Royce; however, it wasnoted in the university records "that by accepting this privilege MissCalkins does not become a student of the University entitled toregistration" (1980). Calkins began attending her first lecture withJames that fall. When she arrived to her lecture she was fortunateenough to be the only person left in the class, therefore giving her aprivate tutoring session of sorts. In addition to taking classes withJames and Royce, Calkins began studying experimental psychology underDr. Edmund Sanford of Clark University.
In the fall of 1891, Calkins returned to Wellesley College as anInstructor of Psychology in the Department of Philosophy. In that sameyear she established a psychological laboratory at the college (1980).
At this time she was already planning on furthering her studies inPsychology and asked James, Royce and Sanford where they felt she shouldlook into attending. Dr. Sanford made it clear in his correspondencethat neither Clark or Johns Hopkins University were not prepared tooffer fellowships for graduate education to a woman. William Jameswrote that Calkins "best opportunity would be served learning under HugoMunsterberg at the University of Freiburg who had had a woman student ayear ago" (1980). He informed her a month later that Munsterberg wouldbe coming to Harvard the following year. Once again another petitionwas submitted, by Calkins, asking for permission to attend ProfessorMunsterberg's laboratory. In 1892, President Eliot of Harvard wrote,once again, that she would be permitted in his laboratory as a guest;but not as a registered student of the university.
During this period Calkins had been writing and conducting severalexperiments within the field of psychology. At this time she inventedthe paired-associate technique. This was a suggested classification ofcases of associations. In her research Calkins originated a technicalmethod for studying memory, later referred to as the method of pairedassociates. G.E. Muller refined the technique, and later Titchenerincluded it in his Student's Manual, taking full credit for it. Shecontinued to conduct research under Professor Munsterberg until Octoberof 1894. At this time Munsterberg wrote to the President and Fellows atHarvard requesting that Calkins be admitted as a candidate for thePh.D. On October 29, 1894, Harvard considered Munsterberg's request andrefused.
In the spring of 1895, Calkins presented her thesis,Anexperimental research on the association of ideas. "At theexamination, held May 28, 1895, before Professors Palmer, James, Royce,Munsterberg, Harris and Dr. Santayana, it was unanimously voted that MissCalkins satisfied all customary requirements for the degree" (1980). InHarvard's records this communication was noted but not considered.
In 1895, Calkins returned to Wellesley College where she was madean Associate Professor of Psychology and Philosophy and was promoted toProfessor in 1898. She wrote hundreds of papers divided between the twodisciplines. Calkins' writings encompass more than a hundred papers inprofessional journals of psychology and philosophy. She wrote fourbooks, including, An Introduction to Psychology (1901); The PersistentProblems of Philosophy (1907), which went through five editions; and TheGood Man and the Good (1918).
Throughout this period Calkins did work in both the fields ofpsychology and philosophy. For example, in the same year she publishedan analytic and experimental essay on association, she also published anarticle on the religiousness of children. Three years later hercontribution to research on the attributes of sensation was published,along with a philosophical treatment of time as related to causality andto space. Her most influential work in philosophy, The PersistentProblems of Philosophy, appeared at the same time as some of herimportant psychological articles on the self (Strunk, 1972).
After 1900, Calkins' major contribution to psychology was thedevelopment of a system of self-psychology (Furumoto, 1980). Her ownwork in the field dealt primarily with such topics as space and timeconsciousness, emotion, association, color theory and dreams. Hertheory held, in contrast to behaviorist views then in the ascendant,that the conscious self is the central fact of psychology. In the fieldof philosophy she acknowledged Royce's idealism as the chief influenceleading her to her own system of "personalistic absolutism."
In 1905, Calkins was elected president of the AmericanPsychological Association and the president of the AmericanPhilosophical Association in 1918. Her achievements brought her anumber of honors in addition to the presidencies. In a 1908 list ofleading psychologists in the United States, Calkins was ranked twelfthof the list (1980). Columbia University bestowed a Doctor of Lettersdegree on her in 1909 and Smith College a Doctor of Laws degree in1910. Both Columbia and Smith also offered her positions on theirfaculty which she declined, partly because of the responsibility shefelt to remain with and look after the welfare of her parents (1980).
In 1929, after a teaching career spanning forty-two years, Calkinsretired from Wellesley College with the title of Research Professor.She planned on devoting her retirement to writing and enjoying thecompanionship of her mother, but less than one year later she was dead,the victim of inoperable cancer (1980).
Two underlying forms of psychology in vogue at the time were"atomistic psychology" and the "science of selves." Calkins wasthe first to "discover" the psychology of selves. She called it areconciliation between structural and functional psychology. Her firstbasic definition of her psychology is as follows:
"All sciences deal with facts, and there are two great classes of facts-Selves andFacts-for-the-Selves. But the second of these great groups, theFacts-for-the-Selves, is again capable of an important division intointernal and external facts. To the first class belong percepts,images, memories, thoughts, emotions and volitions, inner events as wemay call them; to the second class belong the things and the events ofthe outside world, the physical facts, as we may name them... Thephysical sciences study these common and apparently independent orexternal facts; psychology as distinguished from them is the science ofconsciousness, the study of selves and the inner facts-for-selves(cited in Strunk, 1972).
Calkins felt that her psychology could relate, if not directly butindirectly, within other current models of psychology. As SigmundFreud's theory of psychoanalysis gained notoriety, she felt thatself-psychology could interpret all the facts discovered by him. Shewrote, "Self-psychology is finally at the core of every one of thepsychoanalytic systems. Not only does the conscious ego play a role, ifonly a minor role, on the psychoanalytic stage, but even the unconsciousclosely studied turns out to resemble nothing so much as a dissociatedself" (1972).
As psychological views moved on, Calkins theory became dissolved andrather dated. However, in 1937 Gordon Allport wrote Personality: APsychological Interpretation. In this book he gave considerable creditand notoriety to Calkins ideas and self-psychology. However, in thethird revision of his book, he dropped all references to Calkins. Sincethen most of Calkins' ideas and much of her work have been "swept underthe rug."
At the time in which Calkins was struggling to get her educationshe faced many setback because she was a woman. These experiencesshaped many of her views on women's rights and cultivated her intosomewhat of an advocate. In the 1890s, for example, she challenged thework of a colleague, Joseph Jastrow. In his study, he asked collegestudents, both male and female, to write down one-hundred words as fastas possible. He found "that women repeat one another's words more thanmen" and "there is less variety among women than among men" (Furumoto,1980). After analyzing these lists he concluded, "that the femininetraits revealed...are an attention to the immediate surroundings, to thefinished product, to the ornamental, the individual, and the concrete;while the masculine preference is for the more remote, the constructive,the useful, the general, and the abstract" (1980).
Calkins was infuriated by his findings and responded that "ifsufficiently extended, establish characteristic differences in theinterests of men and women." However, she maintained that it was "futileand impossible to attempt a distinction between masculine and feminineintellect per se...because of our entire inability to eliminate theeffect of the environment" (1980).
Another area that she opposed differentiation was the right tovote. In an address to a National Suffrage Convention at Baltimore, shemaintained that: "the student trained to reach decisions in the light oflogic and of history will be disposed to recognize that, in a democraticcountry, governed as this is by the suffrage of its citizens, and givenover as this is to the principle and practice of educating women, adistinction based on difference of sex is artificial and illogical"(1980).
The most profound action against sexist attitudes that she rejectedwas her refusal to accept the offer of a Radcliffe Ph.D. In 1902, sheand three other women who had done graduate work at Harvard, but werenot eligible for a Harvard degree on account of their sex wererecommended by Radcliffe and approved by Harvard as candidates for thedegree of Ph.D. from Radcliffe College. Although she was urged byseveral colleagues to take the degree, she declined. She writes,
"I sincerely admire the scholarship of the three women to whom it is to begiven and I should be very glad to be classed with them. I furthermorethink it highly probably that the Radcliffe degree will be regarded,generally, as the practical equivalent of the Harvard degree andfinally, I should be glad to hold the Ph.D. degree for I occasionallyfind the lack of it an inconvenience; and now that the Radcliffe degreeis offered, I doubt whether the Harvard degree will ever be open towomen. On the other hand, I still believe that the best ideals ofeducation would be better served if Radcliffe College refused to conferthe doctoral degree. You will be quick to see that, holding thisconviction, I cannot rightly take the easier course of accepting thedegree" (1980).
To this day Harvard has not issued any degree in honorof Mary Whiton Calkins and feels that there is "no reason to" award the degree.