The 2015 volume of special topic publication Osiris is now available and dedicated to the theme of “Scientific Masculinities.” Among the plethora of interesting pieces in the issue, is one specifically on the history of psychology: “Maintaining Masculinity in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Psychology: Edwin Boring, Scientific Eminence, and the ‘Woman Problem'” by Alexandra Rutherford. The abstract reads,
Using mid-twentieth-century American psychology as my focus, I explore how scientific psychology was constructed as a distinctly masculine enterprise and was navigated by those who did not conform easily to this masculine ideal. I show how women emerged as problems for science through the vigorous gatekeeping activities and personal and professional writings of disciplinary figurehead Edwin G. Boring. I trace Boring’s intellectual and professional socialization into masculine science and his efforts to understand women’s apparent lack of scientific eminence, efforts that were clearly undergirded by preexisting and widely shared assumptions about men’s and women’s capacities and preferences.
get insiders’ perspectives, from the humourous to the profound, throughout the history of psychology; play “who’s that face?” with collections of unidentified photos, and much more!
Women’s History Month is all about rectifying the gender bias that has traditionally plagued historical scholarship, and thanks to PFV’s great work at York we can help construct a more accurate history by illuminating the crucial roles that women have always played in psychology!
This is part of a special series of posts on the digital history of psychology from members of the PsyBorgs Lab at York University, in Toronto, Canada. The full series of posts can be found here.
Read Mapping Science & Reform: The First Generation of Chicago-Trained Female Social Scientists: Part I, here& Part II, here.
Conclusion: reform movement & research discussion
Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, PhD 1901
Along with those in the social services, much of the work done by individuals identified in the previous post as employed in academia can also be classified as fitting within the reform movement: Matilde Castro was director of the Phebe Anna Thorne Open-Air Model preparatory school at Bryn Mawr; in Chicago, Sophonisba Preston Breckenridge, with her 1913 entry reporting the official position “Assistant Dean of Women,” at the University, was also heading research for the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy; Edith Abbott is listed in this year as its Associate Director.
Here again we confront the fact that there are significant limitations to, as well as advantages of, sticking exclusively to the alumni directories in our analyses. A priority for this project was to explore the possibilities and test the viability of employing primary sources like the directories in collective biography—and while they allowed for a level of precision, they also left our analysis vulnerable to the vagaries of those editors who originally organized the information. The organizational changes made in the 1919 directory render it a considerably less ‘rich’ source than the previous two. Unlike them, it did not organize alumni by their disciplines, or even include the students’ departments in their listings, but instead simply arranged the entire school alphabetically. This factor prevented us from being able to include a third, post-1913 generation in our prosopographical analysis as we could not ascertain from the directory alone who was a social scientist. It also confounded implicit expectations that the information provided would get better over time as the school became better established.
But even taken together as a set, the arbitrariness of the selected years and content can potentially create a historical picture that is inaccurate or misleading, and the integration of information from other sources is necessary for prosopographical purposes. To illustrate, we know from external sources that Breckinridge and Abbott would go on to spearhead the merger of the School of Civics and Philanthropy with the University to become its School of Social Service Administration (Davis, 1984; Muncy, 1991). While the directories can provide an unparalleled opportunity to track the early careers of this cohort, they function best in conjunction with biographical sources to more thoroughly map out the professional trajectories as they developed over a longer period of time. The Breckinridge-Abbott partnership would become highly influential; it can be fairly stated that the many collaborative endeavours over their extensive careers helped lay the theoretical and methodological foundations for the social work industry as it would come to be practiced (Muncy, 1991). Another, lesser known example of a reform oriented career that develops after our alumni directory timeline is that of Elizabeth Laetitia Moon Conard, who after instructing at Grinnell College at the time of the directories, was proactive in Iowa, forming a women’s voting league, advocating for children in poverty, promoting the progressivist party and eventually running for governor on the socialist ticket (Hyman Alonso, 1997).
This is part of a special series of posts on the digital history of psychology from members of the PsyBorgs Lab at York University, in Toronto, Canada. The full series of posts can be found here.
Read Mapping Science & Reform: The First Generation of Chicago-Trained Female Social Scientists, Part I, here.
Employment: Academic & Social Services
The self-identified locations of the first cohort of Chicago-trained female social scientists during the years of the alumni directories show that whether or not it was their place of origin, the East Coast was, not surprisingly, where the majority would end up working. This was particularly the case for the early generation in the cohort (pre-1906).
The following three maps illustrate the locations for the pre-1906 generation as identified in the three directories (1906, 1913, 1919):
Employment locations of pre-1906 gen from the 1906 alumni directory. Click to enlarge.Employment of pre-1906 gen from the 1913 alumni directory. Click to enlarge.Employment of the pre-1906 gen from the 1919 alumni directory. Click to enlarge.
The pre-1906 individuals move around quite a bit, but as can be seen, the general layout is strikingly similar, with the majority clustered in the North and Mid- East Coast, a contingent in Chicago, and a few scattered in Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and California.
This is part of a special series of posts on the digital history of psychology from members of the PsyBorgs Lab at York University, in Toronto, Canada. The full series of posts can be found here.
Chicago Philosophy Club, 1896 Amy Eliza Tanner in white blouse and tie, in between rows
There now exists a large and robust historiography on women and American science before 1970 (Rossiter, 1982; Scarborough & Furomoto, 1987). These works focus on the severe constraints faced by women due to sexist social norms, the tension between pure versus applied work, and the question of whether women scientists generated a specifically feminist-conscious science. With important exceptions (e.g. Rosenberg, 1982; Rossiter, 1982), much of this historiography focuses on a single discipline and often one or two notable (and particularly successful) women. For this project, presented at the 2013 conference of Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral & Social Sciences, we were interested in comparing the careers of female social scientists within and across disciplines. By relying on prosopography rather than biography, we could compare the career patterns of the better known women to their lesser-known peers (Scarborough, 2005; Pettit, 2008).
With these interests in mind, a focus on the University of Chicago made a lot of sense. Founded in 1893, the University of Chicago accepted women as doctoral candidates at a time when such opportunities were not available at elite east coast institutions (e.g., Harvard). Moreover, the city of Chicago was the site of Hull House, the country’s most famous female-centered social reform network (Sklar, 1985; Muncy, 1991) whose members had a complicated relationship with the male social scientists at the University, as Mary Jo Deegan has shown (Deegan, 1988). By looking at the doctorates granted to women in the social sciences, we were interested in exploring whether further connections to this world of reform could be found. Finally, Chicago made sense for pragmatic reasons. Three early editions of The Alumni Directory of the University of Chicago, published in 1906, 1913, and 1919 are available online. These volumes include systematically organized and fairly complete information about undergraduate institution and subsequent employment of all graduates. This kind of source is invaluable for collective biography. One of our goals was to test the possibilities and limitations of relying on this kind of source, so individuals who did not provide either a personal or professional address for any given directory have been left out of its respective maps.
Our questions are fairly simple: where did these women come from prior to entering Chicago and where did they go upon graduation? Did they all receive their undergraduate education at one of the Seven Sisters schools? Did they ultimately teach at the same kinds of women’s colleges, join reform projects (in Chicago or elsewhere), work in other applied settings, or leave professional life?
Pre 1906 female graduate social sciences at U of ChicagoPost 1906 female graduate social sciences at U of Chicago
The first directory published for the school covers the years up to 1906, with the first female doctor of a social science, Hannah Belle Clark, graduating in 1897. Our cohort, comprised of 38 women over 16 years through 1913, graduated with PhDs from a variety of social science and humanities disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, political economy, philosophy, history, education, neurology, sanitary science, and comparative religion. In this first directory, all but one are listed with a combination of two or three disciplinary titles, such as ‘sociology and political economy.’ In the second directory, the majority of listings identify only one department, and after 1910 five out of eight are in psychology. F
or interpretive clarity, the cohort is split into two generational groups: one for the generation who graduated before the first directory was published (we’ll call them pre-1906) and those who graduated between 1906 and 1913 (we’ll call them post-1906). This division functions rather well for a couple of reasons beyond making the maps easier to read: it splits the total directly in half with 19 graduates in each group, and there do seem to be some differences in career trajectories between them, which will be discussed in the following posts, parts II and III.
Another visually interesting website that may be of interest to AHP readers: Making Visible Embryos. The site consists of historical images related to human development arranged in eight sections: Unborn, Development, Learning, Evolution, Remodelling, Standards, Monitoring, and Intervention. Though the site covers a variety of related issues, focus is on imaging technologies and the people responsible for making embryos visible.
In a recent issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 64(1), Rima Apple reviewed Menstruation: A Cultural History. Although she was generally unimpressed with its presentation as a whole, she also notes that there are a few gems.
Much of the historical research has dealt with negative aspects of menstruation: as pollution, as disability, leading to hysteria, and the like. Several essays in this volume show that menstruation was not always conceived in these terms. For example, Hippocratic physicians called menstruation katharsis, translated as “purification.” Previous scholars have taken this to mean that the processes of the female body were pathological and in need for treatment. In Luigi Arata’s interpretation, lack of menstrual flow was the disorder and katharsis must occur to maintain a woman’s health (18). This casts a more positive light on menstruation than normally assumed. Similarly, menstruation is discussed in affirmative terms in Sabine Wilms’ explication of medieval Chinese medicine. Dianne E. Jenett studies the poetry of South India, uncovering connections between menstruation, divinity, and women-focused rituals. In doing so, she too reveals a culture that, unlike the Western world, attributes positive qualities to menstruation. In particular, women’s bodies were considered especially potent in ananku (divine vivifying female power) at menarche, during menstruation, and after childbirth (176).
As an edited volume, this may be a useful source of individual course readings. For historians of psychology in particular, the chapter by Julie-Marie Strange uses records from nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British lunatic asylums. In that context, menstruation was understood to be “a physical illness with implications for mental health.” However, Apple warns that there is no integration between the chapters; lecturers will have to provide this themselves.
Harlequin, the world’s largest publisher of “series romance,” is turning 60. Founded in 1949 — when Winnipeg businessman Richard Bonnycastle began issuing paperback reprints of cookbooks, westerns, detective yarns, and love stories — it now ships over 120 titles a month, in 29 languages. With stories ranging from tame to smutty, the publisher’s archive also offers a condensed social history of love and the making thereof.
The first pregnancy storyline arrived in the 1960s. The late ’70s saw a surge of sexual content, partly in response to the 19th-century S&M-fests penned by Rosemary Rogers, a scandalously popular author at rival publisher Avon. Harlequin cover model Fabio, all oiled chest and blond mane, debuted during the excessive 1980s. (The images in which Fabio commandingly clutches an adoring, half-naked woman are iconic examples of what is known in the industry as “the clinch.”) The ’90s saw some retrenchment into recognizably ordinary lives — heroes and heroines were often ranchers, pediatricians and cops in contemporary small-town North America. Increasingly, romances featured blended families, with single moms reconnecting with high school crushes or widowed fathers silently yearning for nurturing nannies. On these covers, the clinch is replaced by the potent hormonal cocktail of a handsome man holding an infant. (CBC.ca Arts)
According to some reports, Harlequin presently sells an average of 4 books every second. The reason? Passion is universal, claims author Shannon Drake.
Tilli Tansey and Les Iversen recently produced a podcast series on the history of neuroscience, supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. The first episode — “Today’s Neuroscience, Tomorrow’s History” — features Dr. Elizabeth Warrington, one of the pioneers of clinical and cognitive neuropsychology in the 1960s and 1970s. The interview is available, in multiple parts, as MP3 or as a written transcript. Videos have also been made available via YouTube.
Warrington was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986. At the time, however, she was one of only a few women working in the field. Today, the Society for Neuroscience has a special committee devoted to pursuing remedies to address the challenges faced by those who choose to follow in the footsteps of such pioneers.
Angus McLaren has written books about the emergence of the serial killer, medical ethics, abortion, and the history of contraception and eugenics. But it is his most recent works — Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History (Harvard, 2002) and Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago, 2007) — that led him to be profiled in this month’s issue of University Affairs, 50(3).
“I am always fascinated with the question, why? Why should that custom arise? What function did that form of sympathetic magic serve in society? Why was it believed?” And many times, the questions cannot be answered or understood by us in the modern day without the context of the societal relationships and power structures of the earlier time. “I am always saying the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
Another visually interesting website that may be of interest to AHP readers: 
In a recent issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 64(1), 
