Women in Psychology History
Women's History Month
Mary Ainsworth
Mary Ainsworth (1913 - 1999) who provided the most famous body of research offering explanations of individual differences in attachment. She came up with an assessment technique called the Strange Situation Classification (SSC) in order to investigate how attachments might vary between children.
Sandra Bem
Sandra Bem is a contemporary psychologist known for her gender schema theory. She developed the Bem Sex Role inventory, which measures how well people fit into traditional gender roles and characterizes personality as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated.
Mary Whiton Calkins
Over the course of her career, Calkins wrote over a hundred professional papers of topics in psychology and philosophy. In addition to being the first woman president of the American Psychological Association, Calkins also served as president of the American Philosophical Association in 1918.
Anna Freud
Anna Freud created the field of child psychoanalysis and her work contributed greatly to our understanding of child psychology. She also developed different techniques to treat children. Freud noted that children’s symptoms differed from those of adults and were often related to developmental stages. She also provided clear explanations of the ego's defense mechanisms in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936).
Leta Hollingworth
She is known for her important work with exceptional children, but she was also one of the early pioneers in the psychology of women. She challenged the view at the time that women less gifted and talented than men by conducting a large scale study of more than 2,000 male and female infants. She later shifted her focus to the study of exceptional children and the environmental and educational factors that could help nurture giftedness.
Karen Horney
Karen Horney made significant contributions to humanism, self-psychology, psychoanalysis, and feminine psychology. Her refutation of Freud's theories about women generated more interest in the psychology of women. Horney also believed that people were able to act as their own therapists, emphasizing the personal role each person has in their own mental health and encouraging self-analysis and self-help.
Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein had a significant impact on developmental psychology and her play therapy technique is still widely used today. Her emphasis on the role of the mother-child and interpersonal relationships on development also had a major influence on psychology.
Christine Ladd-Franklin
Christine Ladd-Franklin was a psychologist and logician who grew up in a family of women who were staunch supports of women's rights. These early influences may have help play a role in her adult career in academia and research, areas that were at the time not particularly open and welcoming to women. She studied at John Hopkins and completed a dissertation titled "The Algebra of Logic." However, the school did not permit women at that time to receive a Ph.D. Finally, in 1926, 42 years after completing her dissertation, John Hopkins awarded her the doctorate degree she had earned
Eleanor Maccoby
She was the first woman to serve as Chair of the Psychology Department at Stanford (1973-1976). She was elected president of the Western Psychological Association, and the American Psychological Association's (APA) division of Developmental Psychology (Division 7). In addition, Maccoby has received numerous awards, including Distinguished Contribution awards from the Society for Research on Child Development and the American Psychological Association.
Sabina Spielrein
Through her relationship with Jung, Sabina Spielrein had a direct effect on both the development of psychoanalysis as well as the growth of Jung's own ideas and techniques. However, it would be wrong to suggest that this was Spielrein's only contribution to psychology. She was the first person to introduce the idea of the death instincts, a concept that Freud would later adapted as part of his own theory. In addition to introducing psychoanalysis to Russia, Spielrein also influenced other thinkers of the time including Jean Piaget and Melanie Klein.
Mamie Phipps Clark
She played an important role in the civil right movement, as her work with her husband demonstrated that concept of "separate but equal" provided a far from equal education for black youth. Her investigations into self-concept among minorities inspired further research on the subject and opened up new areas of research within the field of developmental psychology. Unfortunately, her important contributions have often been overlooked in the past, with psychology history courses and textbooks mentioning her only in passing. In his book History of Psychology, author David Hothersall notes that minorities, including black and female psychologists, have long been neglected in psychology histories.