1936
Despite having the right to vote many women do not turn out to vote. Suffragists host events to teach women how to vote. From 1920 to 1980 there was a voting gender gap. Fewer eligible women turned out to vote compared to men.
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Mary Whiton Calkins
The following link has an MP3 with information about Mary Whiton Calkins
1887
In 1887, Mary Whiton Calkins was hired to teach Greek at Wellesley College (all female). After two years she was offered another teaching position at Wellesley in the new field of psychology contingent upon her receiving at least a year of graduate training. At the time among the few universities offering advanced degrees in psychology, Harvard and Clark were the only ones with psychology labs. However both institutions were open to men only.
1890’s
“At Harvard, authorities, alumni, and students were adamantly opposed to coeducation….To have women students at Harvard would signal institutional decay” (Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987, p.27). In spite of this opposition, Calkins was given permission to informally study with William James at Harvard and then with Edmund Sandford at Clark University. Because she was not given permission to officially enroll at Harvard or Clark, Sandford encouraged her to study in Europe. He heard that women were slightly more accepted in graduate programs in Germany. In the meantime, the professor she wanted to study with in Germany, Munsterberg, took a three-year position at Harvard. He agreed to work with her and requested permission from Harvard. The Harvard governing board gave her permission but would not let her enroll. After three years she asked for an examination and passed with high praise. However, the Harvard officials refused to grant her a Ph.D. In 1902 the governing board at Radcliffe, the women’s school of Harvard, voted to grant her and three other women the doctor’s degree. Calkins declined the degree because none of her work was done at Radcliffe. None of the other female students did graduate work at Radcliffe in the 1890’s or thereafter. They all studied at Harvard.
1905
Calkins started the first experimental psychology laboratory in a Women’s college Wellesley. In 1905, Mary Calkins became the first female president of the American Psychological Association in 1905, and in 1918, she was the first female president of the American Philosophical Association. Calkins was highly praised for her scholarship, leadership and mentoring. Although her colleagues pleaded with Harvard to grant her an official degree it was not until 1963 that female students were eligible for a Ph. D. from Harvard. However she was awarded two honorary degrees, one from Columbia University and one from Smith College.
Career/Life Balance
In address entitled “The Place for Scholarship in Life,” Mary discussed the career/life balance encountered by women. She said that unmarried daughters, as opposed to sons, were expected to care for their elderly parents. Married women with children encountered even more conflicts in balancing the demands of career and family. In a note for a lecture she wrote, “I should pity and condemn the woman (if there could be such a woman) who turned aside from marriage with a good man whose love she returned in order to pursue any end of scholar” (Place of Scholarship in Life, 1913 MWCP, as cited in Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987).
Her Research
Calkins appears to be responsible for the paired associates method of the study of memory (Madigan & O’Hara, 1992). It is unclear if she developed this method because she gives no explanation of its source in her writings. Furthermore, in 1908, Thorndike used the same method, and created the term but made no reference to her work (Madigan & O’Hara, 1992). Researchers, who have rediscovered her work on association and memory, write that her contributions are “… fundamentally important to our current conceptualization of human memory.” Her later work is considered influential as well. She went on to develop the earliest personality theory that focused on the self.
References
Calkins, M. W. (1930). Mary Whiton Calkins. In C. A. Murchison & E. G. Boring (Eds.), A history of psychology in autobiography (Vol. 1, pp. 31-62). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.
Madigan, S., & O’Hara, R. (1992). Short-term memory at the turn of the century: Mary Whiton Calkins’s memory research. American Psychologist, 47(2), 170-174. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.47.2.170.
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