So, for Women's History Month, I wanted to highlight some of the women who revolutionized the field and helped the world, slowly but surely, realize that mental health is just as important as physical health.
Mary Whiton Calkins
The research she did on memory while studying at Harvard was crucial to the cognitive revolution — yet, at the time, male psychologists took credit for her work. Today, we know that Calkins was the one to invent the test where participants are shown a series of colors and numbers and are asked to recollect what number is paired with each color. She was also the first female president of the American Psychological Association in 1905 and the American Philosophical Association in 1918.
Mamie Phipps Clark
With these findings, the couple theorized that segregation at schools made African American children feel inferior and that these feeling would affect them for the rest of their lives. The results of these tests led the Supreme Court to rule that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional.
Leta Stetter Hollingworth
Hollingworth, New York City’s very first civil service psychologist, is credited with tackling the variability hypothesis, which was traced back to Charles Darwin and stated that men exhibited a greater range of variation when it came to physical and psychological traits. Based on her studies, she found, if there is any difference, it favors women, according to the Psychology Museum of the University of Wisconsin Green Bay.
She then decided to write her dissertation on the belief that, during menstruation, women couldn't be as productive as men. For three months, she tested men and women's performance on various tasks and found zero evidence that menstruation was related at all to poor performance.
Anna Freud
Mary Ainsworth
Karen Horney
Horney is also credited with generating more interest in women's psychology because of her critique of Sigmund Freud's theories. She refuted Freud's famous "penis envy" theory — countering it with her own "womb envy" theory. She said, "Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?"
Melanie Klein
Eleanor Maccoby
"I read something by a Freudian clinic psychologist who published that the essential difference between men and women is that males are active and females are passive. ... And I would talk about how outrageous it was to talk about women as 'passive,'" Maccoby said. "We finally said, 'Let's see if we can put together the evidence for what sex difference there are.' And we began to comb literature. ... The book's basic message is that most of what we think about as essential differences between the sexes are myths. ... Men and women are alike; let's stop stereotyping them with these labels that are not true."
In college, I minored in psychology, and, in my classes, we learned all about the "founding fathers" of psychology — Sigmund Freud...
