The Role of Women in the Early History of Psychology

In my psychology class, I noticed that women outnumbered men. Most of my professors were women as well. When I used to go to the clinic for therapy sessions, the names on the board were mostly of women rather than men. The more I focused on this gender disparity, the more I realized that while women outnumber men in the field of psychology, men dominate its history. The field of psychology widely recognizes men as the most influential figures. 

A 2020 article by the British Psychological Society states that “Eighty per cent of psychology undergraduate students are female, and at Russell Group institutions, the proportion is even higher, standing at around 85 per cent. The statistics reveal that women dominate the psychology profession, with 80 per cent of Clinical Psychologists and Educational Psychologists being female. Similarly, the American Psychological Association reports that “Of the 70,311 students enrolled in psychology graduate programs in 2014, according to CWS data, 75 per cent were women.” 

In India too, there are 40 women professionals for every male therapist, counsellor, or psychologist. Women make up 78% of undergraduates and 71% of graduate students in psychology. Such personal experiences and statistical accounts raise the question of how a field dominated by women has managed to overshadow the contributions of women by consistently highlighting those of men. 

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Historical Context and Background 

Women have always made history as much as men have, not ‘contributed’ to it, only they did not know what they had made and had no tools to interpret their own experience.

Gerda Lerner, American Historian

To understand why society has often overlooked women’s contributions, we must examine the restrictions that limited their academic and professional pursuits in the early 19th and 20th centuries. The prevailing cultural norms saw women only as nurturers, incapable of viewing them in any role outside of that. By limiting women to the roles of caregivers and homemakers, society restricted their access to education and professional opportunities.

Academic pursuits were for men, and if any woman did enter the realm of academia, countless hurdles were placed in her way. Even if she managed to overcome these obstacles, institutions barred her from attaining faculty positions or leading research roles. And if she somehow managed to achieve all of that and conduct her work, she was rarely credited for it, denying her the visibility she deserved. All of this ultimately reduced women to their biology, viewing them as inferior and governed by their biological characteristics rather than rational thought. 

Mary Whiton Calkins, despite completing her studies under William James at Harvard University, was not awarded her Ph.D. solely because of her gender. Even though she became the first female president of the American Psychological Association, Harvard did not recognize her. Christine Ladd-Franklin faced similar hurdles; Johns Hopkins withheld her doctorate for 44 years, preventing her from securing faculty positions even as she published influential work in visual perception.

For Leta Stetter Hollingworth, known for her research on giftedness and gender differences, career advancement was limited to women’s colleges with scarce funding and few research leadership opportunities. Helen Thompson Woolley rigorously studied sex differences, debunking the notion of women’s intellectual inferiority, yet her findings were overshadowed and often dismissed by male contemporaries.

Similarly, Karen Horney challenged Freud’s reductionist views on women, including his “penis envy” theory, which defined women by their biological characteristics rather than rational thought. Horney’s feminist critique faced resistance in a field where psychoanalysts prioritized biological interpretations of female psychology. However, they persisted through the discrimination and blatant disregard of their time and, today, have carved a path for other women entering this field. They paved the way for countless women; they walked so we could run. 

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They Walked, So That We Could Run 

Mary Whiton Calkins stands as a towering figure in psychology. Her achievements flow like an endless river, too vast for any ocean of ink or landscape of paper to fully capture. Not only did she serve as the first female President of the American Psychological Association, but she was also President of the American Philosophical Association. The paired-associates technique for studying learning and memory owes its existence to her, and it has now become a fundamental tool in cognitive psychology for understanding the learning process. 

She devoted much of her career to establishing a framework of self-psychology, which she called personalistic introspective psychology. Like his teacher, William James, she too believed that the conscious, experiencing self should be the focus of psychology. She emphasised that individuals function as selves about others and their environment, meaning the self is inherently social and relational.

She also established the first psychology laboratory at an American women’s college. Despite all her remarkable achievements, meeting all requirements for a PhD, and receiving comments such as “one of the strongest professors of psychology in this country” from her professor Münsterberg, Harvard denied her degree because she was a woman studying at an all-male institution. 

Margaret Floy Washburn, often referred to as the mother of psychology, made groundbreaking contributions to the field. She kicked open doors for women in psychology, with her principal research interests centred on understanding basic psychological processes such as sensation, perception, and movement, with a special focus on animal cognition.

Washburn’s seminal work, “The Animal Mind” (1908), was the first book based on experimental research in animal cognition, exploring how animals experience and interpret their environments. This work went through multiple editions and remained a foundational text in comparative psychology, influencing research and teaching for years. 

Through these editions, Washburn’s work developed a motor theory of consciousness, offering a unique perspective on the deep connection between thinking and motor activity. She fully articulated this theory in her 1916 book “Movement and Mental Imagery,” where she integrated introspection and motor processes. According to her theory, conscious thought is believed to arise from physical movement, establishing a link between mind and body that broadened the understanding of consciousness in psychology. 

Washburn was also an educator who taught at Vassar College for 36 years. There, she championed women’s education and ensured they had opportunities to conduct research and publish. She trained many women in psychological research, inviting them into her laboratory and including them as co-authors on publications—a rare practice at the time. She fostered an academic environment of inclusivity, something she and women before her had been denied. Ironically, Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman to receive a doctorate in psychology—and from Harvard, no less—while she became the second woman to serve as President of the American Psychological Association. The first was Mary Whiton Calkins, who was denied her doctorate from Harvard despite meeting all the requirements. 

Christine Ladd-Franklin was another woman with an illustrious legacy and contributions to the field of psychology and the advancement of women. She is best known as a psychologist, mathematician, and logician. Her significant contribution is the theory of colour vision.

Known as the Ladd-Franklin theory, she proposed that colour vision developed evolutionarily in humans, with black and white vision being early, followed by blue-yellow and then red-green sensitivity. This theory presented an alternative to the trichromatic (Young-Helmholtz) and opponent-process (Hering) theories. 

Logic and philosophy have traditionally been considered fields where men flourish, because how can a woman can be rational and offer her expertise in this domain? However, her contributions to antilogism in logic played a significant role in shaping our knowledge of deductive reasoning. She helped bridge logical reasoning with psychological inquiry. Her interdisciplinary approach highlighted connections between cognitive processes and logical deduction. 

She challenged conventions in academia through her advocacy for the rights and opportunities of women. Also, she confronted Edward Bradford Titchener when he refused her entry to the Society of Experimentalists, citing that women would “inhibit frank discussions” and distract from the enjoyment of smoking. She not only proved she was intellectually equal to some of the most influential men in psychology, but when Johns Hopkins University tried to give Ladd-Franklin an honorary PhD in 1926—after denying it to her in 1882—she demanded the degree she had earned. She had completed her dissertation there over 40 years earlier, even though they hadn’t officially recognized it. In the end, Johns Hopkins gave in. 

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A champion of women’s rights and a pioneer in the field of educational psychology, Leta Stetter Hollingworth continues to be a torchbearer in the field of psychology. She established the field of giftedness, revolutionizing the way intelligence was taught and studied. She developed a curriculum to address the needs of gifted individuals, wrote the first textbook on giftedness, and conducted extensive studies on children with high IQs. Through her intelligence research, she proved that, along with genetics, the environment plays another major role.

She singlehandedly changed the widely held perception that women are intellectually inferior to men and have poorer intelligence. In her research on women’s psychology, Hollingworth challenged the idea that women were essentially incapacitated during their menstrual period.

This incorrect belief that menstruation made women unable to work had a significant impact on women’s rights, as many employers refused to hire women, thinking they wouldn’t be able to perform their jobs for about a week each month.

She studied 23 women and 2 men over three months and found that there were no differences in mental and motor performance at any time during a woman’s menstrual cycle. The APA states, “As the first psychologist in New York City, she helped establish professional standards for the field and was one of the few academicians who promoted and provided psychological services in the schools.” These psychological services in schools emphasized the importance of addressing students’ mental health, leading to better educational outcomes. By integrating psychology into the educational system, she not only advanced the profession but also demonstrated that women’s contributions to psychology were vital, inspiring future generations to pursue careers in this important field. 

Karen Horney, a psychoanalyst and a feminist, revolutionized the field of psychoanalysis for women. She pointed out the inherent reductionist view of women in Freud’s penis envy. This very refusal of Freud’s theories led her to be expelled from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1941. She then established the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. She disagreed with Freud’s idea of deriving female psychology from male psychology and emphasized an important fact: the way our society was structured was the root cause of female psychopathologies.

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In contrast to penis envy, she came up with womb envy. Through this, she pointed out why the world is so male-dominated and how the absence of a womb and thus the consequential absence of abilities of nurturance and motherhood caused men to combat their envy by dominating and occupying all other fields and occupations, placing themselves at the helm of society. She did not let her awe of Freud get the better of her.

Later she explained how neuroses developed as a result of basic anxiety experienced by children. She said infants, “isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world,” adopt certain strategies to cope with this anxiety, which can eventually become persistent and irrational needs that cause both neurosis and personality disorders.

Also, she brought about a 360-degree turn in psychoanalysis by establishing cultural and societal norms as much of a cause of psychological disturbances as childhood and unconscious experiences. She also believed patients could psychoanalyze themselves because the objective of therapy was not only to restructure childhood experiences but also to help patients deal with the woes of everyday life and equip them with the ability to think and pinpoint the source of their anxieties. 

In reflecting on the contributions of all these women, it is clear that they have had a lasting impact on psychology, as well as on the way future women contribute to and continue to shape this profession. These women not only advanced the field of psychology but also championed the rights and recognition of women in academia and beyond. Their groundbreaking work challenged prevailing stereotypes and reshaped our understanding of vital topics. Their legacies remind us of the importance of diverse perspectives in the pursuit of knowledge and the ongoing fight for equality within the field of psychology.