26 Hell Yeah, Women Contributed to the Discipline of Psychology

Introduction

Did you know that the American Psychological Association (APA) website highlights Psychologist Edward L. Palmer worked on the children’s show Sesame Street to discuss learning and development psychology in 1969 (American, 2017)? But it was not until 1970 that an APA amendment, entitled “The Discrimination Against Women”, was finally included in the APA to try to promote equality for women in psychology (America, 2004). Please note this was a staggering 78 years after the APA was created! While Sesame Street is a well-known tv show, this APA faux pas demonstrates the APA priorities and the profound struggles women had to endure to be respected and recognized within the discipline of psychology.

Therefore, it should be unsurprising that the APA was formed in 1892 which included only male founding members (APA, 2008; American, 2017). After women were allowed to join the APA as members, they were actively barred from working within research and in many faculty positions (especially if they were single) and women were constrained to working in schools that did not have laboratories or to work in women specific colleges (Scarborough, 2018). Female psychologists have made significant progress due to APA changes which includes the emergence of women psychologists, the feminist psychology movement, and greater recognition and understanding of the role and contributions of women in the field of psychology.

Women’s Contributions During the Emergence of Psychology

Thankfully, throughout the years, women have been working to establish themselves as peers, collogues, and equals in the ever-growing discipline of psychology.  Unfortunately, this paper lacks the space to highlight the many contributors during the emergence of psychology, but I highlighted three exceptional female psychologist pioneers: Margret Flow Washburn, Mamie Phibbs Clark, and Carolyn Lewis Attneave.

Margret Flow Washburn (1871-1939)

Margret Floy Washburn was a true pioneer as the first (Caucasian) woman to ever receive a PhD in psychology (Rodkey, 2010; Pillsbury, 1940) and she was described as a “brilliant conversationalist”, “having a keen sense of human”, and “a shy youth” in her early days of psychology (Pillsbury

, 1940, p. 100).  She wanted to go to Columbia University, however, they were not accepting female graduate students at the time and so she graduated from Cornell University in 1894. Washburn’s focus centered on consciousness and mental processes in humans and animals and was instrumental in building the field and writing definitions and vocabulary in her comparative psychology textbook called The Animal Mind in 1908 (Rodkey, 2010). At some point after that, Washburn moved away from structural psychology and focused her research on learning, attention, and emotion which led her to write the Movement of Mental Imagery in 1917 (Rodney, 2010). This groundbreaking theory showed that animals looking at threats from a distance took time to think and decide on the best course of action which showed that animals could have higher brain processes than originally thought of (Rodkey, 2010). Washburn was a professor of psychology and chair from 1908 until her retirement in 1937 and was an associate professor until her passing in 1939 at Vassar College (Pillsbury, 1940). She is remembered as having “great initiative, good taste, and tact” and that her passing was “a great loss” to the psychology dominion (Pillsbury, 1940, p. 109).

Mamie Phibbs Clark (1917-1983)

Mamie Phibbs Clark started her post-secondary education studying math but switched to psychology, then she obtained her MA at Howard University and later became the first African American woman to earn a PhD in psychology at Columbia University in 1943 (Karera, 2010; Lawery, 2021). Clark shared that her childhood as being happy and privileged as her father had his own medical practice (Karera, 2010). It is unsurprising that her psychology focus centered on racism, segregation, identity development, and counseling psychology. Clark conducted what is now famously known as the “Clark Doll Test” for her thesis which showed that children, of a variety of races, would prefer white dolls over African American dolls by a staggering 65% of the time (Karera, 2010). This study and her work were pivotal in the 1954 Supreme court case, Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, which led to the ruling that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional in America (Karera, 2010; Lawery, 2021).

Clark is quoted as saying, “Although my husband had earlier secured a teaching position at the City College of New York, following my graduation it soon became apparent to me that an African American female with a Ph.D. in psychology was an unwanted anomaly in New York City in the early 1940s” (Karera, 2010, para. 9).  According to Karera (2010), she never held a position as a professor in a university, however, she found a counseling position at the Riverdale Home for Children that helped to support homeless African American girls. Clark was passionate to support Harlem’s underfunded community by opening The Northside Center for Child Development and served as the Director until retirement in 1979 (Karera, 2010; Lawery, 2021).

Carolyn Lewis Attneave (1920-1992)

I would be negligent if I failed to include the first Indigenous woman to obtain her PhD in psychology. Carolyn Lewis Attneave attended Stanford University and graduated with her degree in clinical psychology in 1952 (George, 2019; Trimble & Clearing-Sky, 2009). She received her degree, a staggering, 58 years after Washburn earned her PhD and eight years before Indigenous people had the right to vote (Leslie, 2016). Attneave was also a pioneer by getting her PhD in psychology but also by being one of the first U.S. Coast Guards in the mid-1940s (Oklahoma, n.d.). According to George (2019), Attneave was not drawn into competition between collogues and preferred to work in collaboration with them. In the 1970s, Attneave wrote, edited, and founded the Network for Indian Psychologists newsletter that was designed for high Indigenous communities to shared available resources, and today, this newsletter is called the Society of Indian Psychologists (APA, 2008; Trimble & Clearing-Sky, 2009). She was a founding member of the largest Indigenous center in America called the Boston Indian Council (Oklahoma, 2019; Trimble & Clearing-Sky, 2009).

Attneave was highly regarded as being a pioneer, being respectful, and being inclusive to all those she worked with (Chesley, 2019). While working at Harvard University in the 1970s, she developed a nine-page document that focused specifically to the “mental health needs, service networks and utilization patterns for the Indian Health Service” (American, 2010; Trimble & Clearing-Sky, 2009). After her retirement in 1980, she wanted to relax by working in her garden, and traveling (Trimble & Clearing-Sky, 2009). In 2019, Stanford University renamed a building after Attneave to highlight her contribution to psychology by creating the field of Indigenous psychology (Peacock, 2019).

Changes in the APA That Effected Women

In July 1892, the American Psychological Association (APA) was created by G. Stanley Hall (president) and had 31 other male members (American, 2008; Fernberger, 1932; Scarborough, 2018). It was not until 1926 that new non-voting members could join, called associate members, which did include women. After World War II (WWII), the APA grew substantially due to a few contributing factors such as (1) people returning from the war needed psychological help (2) the creation of the National Institute of Mental Health helped to provide awareness and acceptance (3) psychology was able to be recognized as a science and practice and, therefore, received a lot more funding (American, 2008).

The Emergency Committee in Psychology (ECP) was created in 1940 because of the WWII, however, this committee only allowed for male members to work towards helping with the war. Unsurprisingly, 30 female psychologists challenged this and joined with the American Association of Applied Psychology group to complain to the ECP president but were told to be “good girls” until they decided to include them (Psychology, n.d., para. 3). Naturally, being good did not last long. The day after Pearl Harbour (1941) was bombed, these pioneering women created the National Council of Women Psychologists (NCWP) to help contribute to helping end the war and by the following year, they had over 230 women with PhD’s in this counsel (Psychology, n.d.). The NCWP was the time that female psychologists banded together to fight for equality in their professional careers.

Finding equality between men and women has been an uphill struggle and is still an ongoing issue. While many things happened in 1969, like man landing on the moon, one main critical movement by the APA was that they supported women having an abortion as one of their civil rights (American, 2004). These discussions also helped to support the 1970 Discrimination Against Women amendment because the APA wanted to “promote full utilization of their talents” (America, 2004, p. 3).

In 1973, the APA had removed homosexuality as one of their mental disorders which was a significant step towards promoting equality for gay women and for the LGBTQ+ community (Mills, 2017). All these individual, yet huge acts needed to happen for the feminism movement to happen and to continue flourishing.

Women and the Canadian Psychological Association

It is interesting to note that it was 1918 that women were included as “persons” within Canadian law and could vote (Ball, et al., 2013). Interestingly, the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) was not formed until 1939 which (unlike the APA) included six women (Pyke, 2001). However, this number is dramatically lower than the 3,100 women in the APA in 1940 (as cited in Pyke, 2001). While there is not a lot of documentation on the contributions of Canadian female psychologists, Pyke (2001) stated that women did make many contributions in the emergence of psychology and that there was never the same degree of pushback from the academic patriarchy as within the United States APA. According to Pyke (2001), this was most likely because Canadian female psychologists did not pursue research or work to openly challenge the traditional feminine stereotypes.

In the northern hemisphere, it was not until 1975 that the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) issued their own Task Force of Women in Canadian Psychology which published in 1977 and had almost 100 recommendations on the status of women in psychology (Pyke, 2001). This report became “the blueprint for the design of future reforms” within the CPA (Pyke, 2001, p. 270). For example, the following year Dr. Stark created the Institute on Women and Psychology was a conference that focused on the “presentation and discussion of research and practice issues relevant to women” (Pyke, 2001, p. 271). Also, in 1980, the Section of Women and Psychology (SWAP) became a section in the CPA and is still thriving today (Pyke, 2001).

Feminism Movement in Psychology

Feminism has been a part of psychology since around the conception of the APA. As stated previously, the APA formed in 1892 (APA, 2008) and, as you may recall, the original pioneer Margaret Washburn was working towards becoming the first female psychologist which she received in 1894 (Rodkey, 2010; Pillsbury, 1940). Washburn paved the way for women to fight for their right to attend graduate school for psychology and gain their degree. In 1903, Helen Thompson Woolley wrote The Mental Traits of Sex which was the  first dissertation written about the differences between the sexes (Ball, et al., 2013). In this paper,

she discovered that “men and women are more the same than different, and any differences cannot be interpreted until the environments women and men encounter are the same” which paved the way for people to start to alter the way women’s capabilities are seen (Ball, et al., 2013, p. 263). While her dissertation

was not welcome widespread, she helped to pave the way for others to challenge the widely held negative assumption that women are inferior to men (Rodkey, 2010). In 1970, a task force of eight women were asked by the APA to investigate the Status of Women in Psychology and the report listed several ways to stop sexist practices within psychology (Pyke, 2001). This was published in 1973. After four years of protest, the Society for the Psychology of Women (originally known as Division 35) was finally established within the APA (Pyke, 2001). The Committee was also established and with these institutional presences, women had a stronger voice within the American Psychology Association.

The Psychology of Women was finally allowed to become Division 35 within the APA in 1974 (Dewsbury, 1997). According to Dewsbury (1997), the women of Division 35 led the fight against the APA to ratify the Equal Act Amendment in every state by only agreeing to meet in states that already had the Equal Act. The Equal Rights Amendment was finalized across the entire APA in 1975 after a report by the Association of Women in Psychology’s Ad Hoc Committee on Sexist Language is printed (American, 2004). In 1976, this Division created the first “Psychology of Women Quarterly” (Dewsbury, 1997, p. 739) which was a peer-reviewed journal that consisted of mostly women. The CPA formed the Interest Group on Women and Psychology (IGWAP) in 1976 and was the equivalent to the APA’s Division 35. The Canadian Psychological Association is always a few years behind the APA and this delay seemed to result in less push back from its members (Pyke, 2001).

Conclusion

The progress made by women in psychology is a testament to the importance of inclusivity and recognition of diverse perspectives in the fields. The changes brought about by the Canadian and American Psychological Associations, the emergences of female psychology influences, and the feminist movement in psychology have led to a greater understanding of the challenges and experiences women psychologists have had to overcome. While many opportunities for women to contribute to the discipline of psychology, there is still a lot of work to be done to elevate women to have equity, representation, and recognition. Hopefully one day women can really be seen as equals in psychology so then Dr. Wendy Stone could be seen for her contribution in creating the first autistic character on Sesame Street and be acknowledged in the APA timeline (Herndon, 2015).