Wednesday Geek Women: Mary Whiton Calkins and Elizabeth Spelke, psychological scientists

This is a guest post by Shauna, a psychologist, programmer, writer and blogger. This post appeared on her blog for Ada Lovelace Day 2011.

For Ada Lovelace day I thought I’d go back to my roots and write about a psychological scientist. Being as I am prone to digressions, I ended up writing about two – one historical, one current. We’ll go chronologically.

Mary Whiton Calkins was born in the 1860s in Connecticut who studied classics and philosophy at Smith College. She took a job teaching Greek at Wellesley College after graduating, where by a combination of luck and talent she caught the eye of a psychology professor. He asked her to come teach psychology, but requested she spend a year studying it first. It was in this way that Calkins started taking classes at Harvard, and with William James himself among her tutors and mentors, it’s maybe not surprising that her interest in the field grew. She spent the next two years taking classes at Harvard and doing research into dreams with collaborator Edmund Sanford. Though their research would soon be eclipsed by Sigmund Freud (who did acknowledge and cite their work), their discovery that dream content could be influenced by external stimuli is much in line with our current theories of dreams.

In 1891 she returned to Wellesley to teach, and established there an experimental psychology laboratory, the first of its kind at any women’s college and only the twelfth in the United States. Over the next ten years, she trained hundreds of women in experimental psychology, putting out articles on subjects such as child development, aesthetics, and synesthesia. Hoping to continue her studies at Harvard, she also petitioned the university to become a graduate student, but the college did not allow female graduate students at the time and she was refused. Nevertheless, she continued to take classes, and three years later an unsanctioned committee of six Harvard professors awarded her an unofficial doctorate. Despite numerous petitions over the last 100+ years, Harvard has never awarded her an official one.

Calkins’ biggest research contribution is probably her work on paired association, a memory technique that is still used today. My favorite work of hers, though, is Community of Ideas of Men and Women, an article she published in 1891 in Psychological Review in response to one Dr. Joseph Jastrow. Jastrow had looked at lists of words generated by women and men, and claimed then men showed greater variety in word choice. This, he said, was evidence for the “Variability Hypothesis” – the theory that men have a greater range of abilities than women, with more men than women falling at the high and low ends of any given spectrum. Calkins and her student Cordelia Nevins replicated Jastrow’s study but not his results, and in their paper called into question the fundamental assumptions of his research:

[Jastrow et al] by the expression ‘masculine and feminine mental traits,’ attempt a distinction between masculine and feminine intellect per se, and this seems to me futile and impossible, because of our entire inability to eliminate the effect of environment. Now the differences in the training and tradition of men and women begin with the earliest months of infancy and continue through life. Most of the preferences which have been substantiated by both experimenters, for instance that of women .for the surroundings of a home, are obviously cultivated interests… The question of the essential difference between masculine and feminine mind seems to me, therefore, untouched by such an investigation.

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