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Women in Psychology

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Women in Psychology
Susan Hall
University of Phoenix
PSY
310
Lillian Filpot
May 03, 2012

Women in Psychology
Nebraska native Leta Stetter Hollingworth was an amazing woman who met the challenges of her time head-on employing intelligence, common sense, observation, and scientific method. Throughout her career the thread of continuity for her pursuits was the subject of variability (Benjamin & Shields, 1886-1993). Commencing her career with a degree in literature and a teaching certificate, Leta detoured into the fields of sociology and psychology finding the additional degrees necessary tools for change. Leta was an early 20th century feminist psychologist and advocate for women’s rights. By 1911, her determination and use of scientific method yielded proof that women were equal to men in terms of their intellectual capabilities. She sought equality for clinical psychologists doggedly determined to construct a framework of professional practice standards. Application of the standards raised the practice to a level considered suitable for inclusion in the American Psychological Association during World War 1. Leta was a gifted and prolific writer who produced her own text books, generated scores of journal articles and wrote poetry. She loved her husband, Harry, and their devotion to each other is chronicled in the biography he wrote (Hollingworth, 1943).
Beginnings
Leta Settor Hollingworth was born on the plains of Nebraska on May 25, 1886. The rushing of wind across fields of prairie grass and the evening chorus of the cicadas and crickets, were Leta’s first lullaby. Her mother, Margaret Danley, bore two more daughters in quick succession. Unfortunately, the stress was too much for the petite fragile woman who succumbed to death following the birth of her third child. “She was so small that her ring would not span my littlest finger and she was too meek and tender-hearted for this world” (Hollingworth, 1943, p. 29). Margaret recorded the events of Leta’s first year of life in a journal that became the only enduring memory passed on to her daughter. Despite the lack of long-term bonding, Leta longed for her mother and wrote about it in her later poetry.
Her father, John Stetter is described in many sources as a rogue. Certainly he was not focused on raising children preferring instead to take on multiple roles including rancher, peddler, trader, minstrel cowboy, absentee farmer, and speculator. He also owned bars and entertainment halls (Hollingworth, 1943). Demonstrating his self-centered outlook on life, he did not hesitate to leave his three daughters in the care of their maternal grandparents very soon after Margaret Danley died. Those years living in a log cabin with her grandparents provided fond memories for Leta but nothing ever erased the pervasive sadness the brooding, sensitive, child expressed in her personal journal. Ten years after his wife’s death, John Stetter remarried and moved the girls to Valentine, Nebraska, to live with him and their stepmother. The household plagued by unhappiness brought on by the pervasive, destructive forces of alcoholism was a stark difference to the calm of prior life in the cabin. Reference to this period of her life was chronicled in Leta’s journals as the “fiery furnace.” She described her secondary education in a one room school house as excellent and individualized.
Leta’s early college education at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln began in 1907 when she was only fifteen. She described her first impression of the experience in her journal in a poetic manner. “An ‘emotion’ of the irresistible swept over me, an ‘impression’ of inevitable movement and destination, if you will” (Hollingworth, 1943, p. 60). At the University of Nebraska, she obtained both a B.A. in Literature and a State Teacher’s Certificate. She met her future husband, Harry Levi Hollingworth, her sophomore year. While betrothed but unmarried, Harry’s graduate work at Columbia University in New York necessitated a move for him while Leta remained behind in his hometown of DeWitt, Nebraska. There she obtained her first employment as an assistant principal of the high school. She taught in that school for one year then moved to a second teaching position in McCook, Nebraska. Her teaching career ended in the middle of her second year at McCook when Harry, having obtained an assistant professorship at Barnard College could afford to bring her to New York. They were married on December 31, 1908.
Onward Bound
Harry and Leta were quite happy in their marriage but those first few years were quite frustrating for her when she could not secure a job and had to busy herself with housework and continuing her writing efforts. After three years in a tiny apartment in New York, the couple managed to budget enough funds for Leta to begin graduate courses in literature. Ambitious and seeking intellectual stimulation, Leta applied for scholarships and fellowships to finance a full graduate course load. She was denied funding on every application. The lack of funding available to women combined with Leta’s keen observation of numerous other social maladjustment problems led her to change the direction of her studies to education and sociology (Hollingworth, 1943). In 1913, she received her Master’s degree in Education from Columbia University. Not long after receiving the Columbia degree, she found employment at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives. It was a part-time job for which she received no training. Her responsibility was to administer Binet (S-B) IQ tests. In 1914, the Civil Service undertook the supervision of this job making it mandatory for examiners to take competitive examinations to establish eligibility for a position. Leta achieved the highest score and subsequently filled the first position as a psychologist under Civil Service in New York. An opening at Bellevue Hospital as a psychologist presented itself as her first opportunity. She accepted the job and was later offered the position of chief of the psychological laboratory (Benjamin & Shields, 1886-1993). While in this position, she completed her Doctorate work at Columbia under the tutelage of Edward Thorndike and received her Ph.D. in June 1916. Concurrently, she accepted a teaching position in educational psychology at Columbia Teacher’s College and remained in that position for the rest of her life (Hollingworth, 1943). Throughout the time, Leta continued her work at Bellevue at least one day a week. She also aided in the establishment of the Classification Clinic for Adolescents, and took on responsibilities as principal of the School for Exceptional Children at Columbia (Stevens & Sheldon, 1982).
Psychology of women and Sex Difference
While completing her graduate work at Columbia University, Leta critically observed the status of women. Her quandary was whether women were deemed inferior to men because they were victims of the male-dominated society or if it were biological in basis (Benjamin, 1975). Challenging the variability hypothesis through the use of scientific method and data, Leta conducted two critical experiments to determine if a variability of the sexes existed. In the first study, Leta and Helen Montague collected data on 1,000 consecutively born males and 1,000 consecutively born females in the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Then following strict criteria, they measured 10 anatomical features on each infant. While on the whole male infants tended to be slightly larger than the females, there was no variability difference between the sexes. “For the first time a serious crack had appeared in the armor of the variability hypothesis” (Benjamin, 1975, p. 499).
The next topic Leta tackled was known as “functional periodicity,” or the female menstrual cycle. This experiment was the subject of her 1916 Doctoral thesis. At that point in history, the widely held theory was that women were rendered semi-invalid for the portion of each month during which their menstrual cycle occurred. Leta scoffed at the thought deeming it typical of the superstition and prejudice dominate in medicine at that time. To test her hypothesis, Leta structured a data-based, three-month long test that included 23 females and two males as control subjects. All 25 individuals performed tasks that involved the use of motor skills, cognitive abilities, and perception. She concluded there was no performance differential evident during any cyclical phase.
These examples represent a sample of the work Hollingworth did to establish equality of the sexes and empower women through knowledge.
Adolescents, Mentally Deficient and Mentally Gifted Children
Leta Hollingworth is probably best known for her work with gifted children. This particular course of interest originated during her tenure at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives administering IQ tests. She began doing research on the characteristics common to mentally deficient and mentally gifted individuals (Benjamin & Shields, 1990). She learned when working with “mentally defective” children that many of them possessed normal intelligence but were simply suffering from normal adolescent adjustment issues (Benjamin & Shields, 1990). In total, Leta wrote five text books focusing on this group. They are: Psychology of Special Disability in Spelling (1918), The Psychology of Subnormal Children (1920), Special Talents and Defects (1923), The Psychology of the Adolescent (1928), and The Problem of Mental Disorder (1934). It is noteworthy, that Leta wrote these books while teaching full-time, and working at Bellevue.
Leta believed that the appropriate educational opportunities did not exist for children at the “gifted” end of the IQ spectrum. Generally, the opinion of educators was “the bright can take care of themselves” (Hollingworth, 1943, p. 103). Consequently, Leta developed a process that addressed four fundamental needs for this group. The needs were daily contact, identification early in life, integration into mainstream, and recognition that their unique needs were not met by standard school structure.
The inception of this experiment with the gifted began in 1922 with a group of 50 children age’s seven to nine with IQs over 155. New York City P.S. 165 served as her laboratory. The study identified two primary purposes. The first was to gather data about as many aspects of the children’s lives as possible, including cultural/social issues, psychological make-up, and physical and social adaptability traits. The second was to build a construct curriculum that would benefit their lives and foster intellectual development. Her book Gifted Children (1926) contains the results of the study. Leta maintained contact with this original group for the next 18 years and expanded her study to include the spouses and children of the original participants.
A second experiment with gifted children was initiated with the establishment of New York City P.S.500 (Speyer School) in 1936. Unlike the first trial, this study was inclusive of both gifted children and those with special educational problems. The group of gifted seven to nine year olds was gathered with attention to maintaining a racial mix that mirrored that of other New York City schools. The curriculum developed by Dr. Hollingworth was called “Evolution of Common Things.” She believed that because children express interest in exploration of their world, enrichment curriculum should consist of normal extensions of their home lives. Therefore, food, shelter, clothing, transportation, tools, time keeping, and communication were key components of the curriculum. The children gathered their own learning materials and worked in units. This type of learning proved more beneficial to the gifted students than introducing them to replicative advanced subject matter that they would later encounter in college (Hollingworth, 1943).
Dr. Hollingworth went on to perform many more studies with gifted children. What is interesting about the results of one study is that Leta and a colleague formulated a hierarchy of IQ level based upon the premise that there are some kinds of work that are suited only for the highly intelligent. This concept was an outgrowth of the prior P.S. 150 school experience. The supposition was that children with IQs (S-B) 130- 160 are conservators of knowledge and originators of the new ideas and techniques to advance civilization, and those children with IQs (S-B) of 160+ are suited for the advancement of knowledge. The total of the two categories is equal to only 1% of the total population. To support the children in this population, a special curriculum was devised that included concepts that are considered standard today. Examples include field trips to museums and factories, the use of dictionaries and encyclopedias, learning about the relationship between civilization and the lives of significant people, foreign language, art, and music (Hollingworth, 1925).
Near the end of her life, Leta began studying children with IQs over 180. Her findings were primarily that this unique group suffered many adjustment problems stemming from lack of intellectual stimulation and neglect by adults who assumed these children to be inherently self-sufficient, and thus paid them little attention. (Hollingworth, 1942).
Conclusion
Leta Stetter Hollingworth died on November 27, 1939 of abdominal cancer. She was only 53. Her accomplishments are impressive for any one individual. When considered with regard to the institutional barriers she faced, and the general notions about women that contextually defined that time in history, she was nothing short of amazing. Five years after receiving her Ph.D., she was listed in “American Men of Science,” and she holds a distinct place with only 13 other women listed in Robert Watson’s “Eminent Contributors to Psychology”. At the time of her death, she was planning another book entitled Mrs. Pilgrim’s Progress as she never forgot her roots in social psychology of women (Hollingworth, 1943). When asked how she became listed as a woman of achievement, she wrote: “I do not know. I was intellectually curious. I worked hard, was honest except for those minor chicaneries which are occasionally necessary when authority is stupid, disliked waste, and was never afraid to undertake an experiment or to change my mind. My family motto, translated from Latin, reads, I Love to Test. Perhaps that is the explanation” (Hollingworth, 1943, p. 81).
I find Leta’s story compelling in that it proves one person can make tremendous and enduring difference in the direction of not only one person, one town, or one country but rather of civilization. I think that Leta would agree that each of us, “we” as mental health students and advocates are charged to take action. What comes to my mind as I conclude this brief overview of monumental achievements is the quotation “In every chain of reasoning, the evidence of the last conclusion can be no greater than that of the weakest link of the chain, whatever may be the strength of the rest.” (Reid, 1786)

References
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Benjamin, L. T., Rogers, A. M., & Rosenbaum, A. (1991). Coca--Cola, caffeine, and mental deficiency: Harry Hollingworth and the Chattanooga trial of 1911. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 27(), 42-55.
Benjamin, L. T., & Shields, S. A. (1886-1993). Women in psychology: A bio-bibliographic sourcebook (O’Connell & N.F. Russo ed.). Westport, Connecticut (pp.173-183): Greenwood.
Griffin, N. S. (1990, March 01). Leta Hollingworth as a Model for a Teacher of Learning. Roeper Review, 12(3), 192.
Hollingworth, H. L. (1943). Leta Stetter Hollingworth. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Hollingworth, L. (1914). Variability as related to sex differences in achievement. American Journal of Sociology, 19(), 510-530.
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Hollingworth, L. (1920). The psychology of Subnormal Children. New York: Macmillan.
Hollingworth, L. (1927). The new woman in the making. Current History, 27(), 15-20.
Hollingworth, L. (1931). Adolescence: The Difficult Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hollingworth, L. S. (). 1886-1939. Educational Psychologist. Retrieved from http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/hollingworth.html
Hollingworth, L. S. (1916, July). Social Devices for Impelling Women to Bear and Rear Children. American Journal of Sociology, 22(1), 19-29. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable2763926
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Hollingworth, L. S. (1939, October). Problems of Relationship Between Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Case of Highly Intelligent Pupils. Journal of Educational Sociology, 13(2), 90-102. Retrieved from http://wwww.jstor.org/stable/2262072
Hollingworth, L. S. (1942). Children Above 180 IQ. Retrieved from www.indiana.edu/~intell/hollingworth.shtml
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Reid, T. (1786). Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man [Monograph]. , ). Retrieved from www.phrases.org.ukmeanings/the-weakest-link.html
Shields, S. A. (1975). Ms. Pilgrim’s progress: The contributions of Leta Stetter Hollingworth to the psychology of women. American Psychologist, 30(), 852-857.
Shields, S. A., & Mallory, M. E. (1987). Leta Setter Hollingworth speaks on “Columbia’s legacy”. Psychology of Women Quarterly, II(II), 285-300.
Silverman, L. K. (1990, March 01). Social and Emotional Education of the Gifted: The Discoveries of Leta Hollingworth. Roeper Review, 12(3), 12.
Stevens, G., & Sheldon, G. (1982). The Women of Psychology: Volume 1: Pioneers and Innovators.(pp. 176-186) Cambridge, Massachusetts: Shenkman Publishing Company.

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...Attention, learning, and memory Attention and memory are human thought process essential to pursuit of learning. Attention is the act of selectively focusing on a certain stimuli to create imprints or memories in mind. Memory provides recollection of the stimuli previously learned. And, learning is a lifelong pursuit facilitated by attention and memory. Human brain with its complexity is wired differently in each individual. Therefore, each individual’s attention and memory is interlinked with that individual’s learning style. One of the ways individuals learn in the modern era is online learning. Online learning offers the opportunity to pursue an education and convenience of learning from the comfort of one’s home. In other words, online learning occurs in an asynchronous environment. Students who are enrolled in online institutions must create an environment for themselves, because despite the convenience online learning does not necessarily facilitate a traditional classroom learning environment. For example, in a traditional classroom, students are sitting in neat spaces with their attention pierced on the professors’ lectures and taking notes. The occurrence of any distractions is very limited. Student can make use of their potential learning style to retain the information. Whereas, online students may get disrupted by presence of divided attention, dichotic listening or cocktail party phenomenon, and learning still occurs, but learning styles may get adjusted. Online...

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...Women in Psychology Paper PSY/310- History and Systems of Psychology September 16, 2012 Laura Rolen Like women, members of minority groups have been on the outside looking in for most of psychology’s history. Unlike the case for women, however, significant gains for blacks and most other minorities were not made in the years following World War II, and minorities continue to be underrepresented in psychology (Goodwin & Wiley & Sons inc., Chapter 15, 2008). In this paper I will be discussing Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930), Calkins was an American philosopher and she was the first of her generation of women to enter into psychology. Calkins was born on March 30, 1963 in Hartford, Connecticut she was the eldest of five children who were born to Charlotte Whiton Calkins (mother) and Wolcott Calkins (father). Calkins father was a Presbyterian minister her and her siblings lived and grew up in Buffalo New York, and at the age of 17-years-old her and her family moved to Newton, Massachusetts. Calkins started taking college classes at Smith College in 1882 where she was a...

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