Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) was an American philosopher and psychologist, a pioneer in experimental psychology and the first woman president of the American Psychological Association. In addition, and in the context of contradictions between the social demands assigned to women, Calkins was one of the pioneers in the struggles for women’s participation in higher education and science .

In this article we will review a short biography of Mary Whiton Calkins and see some of her contributions to gender equity and experimental psychology.

Mary Whiton Calkins: biography of an experimental psychologist

He was born on March 30, 1863 in Hartford Connecticut. Daughter of Charlotte Whiton Calkins and a Presbyterian minister, Wolcott Calkins, as well as the eldest of five brothers with whom she was very close. She grew up and lived in Buffalo, New York, and later in Newton, Massachusetts.

In 1882 Calkins began his studies at Smith College for Women, a year before the death of his sister Maud; an event that marked part of his later formation. He stayed at home for some time, where he also looked after his mother, and took private lessons in Greek. It was in 1884 that returned to Smith College, and graduated with honours in classical philosophy .

Two years later he travelled around Europe, where he took the opportunity to continue studying Greek. When she returned to the United States, her father had arranged an interview for her at the newly created Wellesley College, a college for women in Massachusetts, where she was looking to become a professor and researcher.

Calkins and Wellesley’s first psychology lab

In 1888, Mary Whiton Calkins began teaching philosophy at the Wellesley School for Women. At the same time, the specialty of scientific psychology was opened and the lack of teachers prepared to teach it was recognized.

To solve this, one of the psychologists offered Calkins, a trained philosopher with important teaching skills, a position as a psychology professor. She thus had the opportunity to create the first Wellesley laboratory.

She accepted with a commitment to train in the area for at least one year. However, this created a new problem: where to study. At this time the opportunities for women were almost non-existent and, in addition, Calkins had taken on family commitments, so she did not wish to leave the city.

From “special student” to APA President

At Harvard University, and in a context where psychology and philosophy were not formally divided, but where the participation of women was strongly denied in any case, there were several philosophers and psychologists who began to receive them as “listeners”, both in their classes and in the laboratories. William James and Josiah Royce, for example, were examples of teachers who did this, as they took a strong stand against Harvard’s policies of exclusion of women.

In 1889, Mary Calkins began taking classes in Physiological Psychology with James , and in Hegelian philosophy with Royce, within Harvard University but as a “special student”. In the following year, Calkins worked with Edmund Sanford of Clark University, and founded the first psychology lab at Wellesley College, which he combined with teaching.

At the same time, during 1984 and 1985, Mary Whiton Calkins was trained at Harvard University and developed research that significantly influenced modern experimental psychology. All this even after Harvard University responded with a categorical refusal to officially recognize her doctoral studies . Instead, they offered him recognition from Radcliffe College, which was the “annex” school of the same university. Calkins rejected the latter because he did not want to legitimise the lack of legitimacy that Harvard was giving to the students.

She continued to work at Wellesley College, as a teacher’s assistant, then a professor of psychology and finally, a year before her death and once she had retired, she was recognized as a research professor, without the official recognition of her doctorate by Harvard.

During the strong policies of academic and scientific exclusion of women, Mary Whiton Calkins was elected in 1905 as the first woman president of the American Psychological Association . At her term, in 1918, she served as president of the American Philosophical Association.

The Associated Pairs Technique and the Psychology of the Self

His first works in psychology were focused on the study of memory. Among other things and as a result of her doctoral thesis, Mary Whiton Calkins laid the foundations of what we know as the “associated pair technique” or “associated pair task” , currently used in cognitive assessment tests. Broadly speaking, it consists of the proposal that we can learn and memorize them from start to finish, until we are presented with some stimulus that results in the withdrawal of another.

Later, he focused on the development of a “psychology of the self”, from which he suggests that mental processes exist without independence from the Self; that is, they are processes that belong to an “I”.

Calkins said that the self is something indefinable , but that it can be understood as an object of daily consciousness in reference to different characteristics: totality, singularity, identity, variability, and the relationship of the self with other organisms or objects. In the constitution of the mental processes associated with the Self, Calkins was critical of the functionalist psychology that understood mental activities without “mental actors”.

The psychology of the self, for her, is a type of introspective psychology , which led her to differentiate between two types of psychological systems. On the one hand there is the impersonal psychology that tends to deny the Self when it focuses on the contents of consciousness and mental processes, and on the other hand, there is the personal psychology that is based on the study of the self or the person. Calkins located his proposals within the latter, in turn divided into a biological and a psychological dimension, closely related to each other.

Through bringing into dialogue different perspectives of psychology and philosophy, as well as the critiques he received about his work, Calkins continued to develop and update the psychology of the self in important ways.

His studies on the self were presented in 1900, and from there he published four books and more than 50 articles , which gave him much prestige at a national and international level. Among his most important works are The Persistent Problems of Philosophy , from 1907, The Self in Scientific Psychology from 1915 and The good man and the good , from 1918.

Bibliographic references:

  • Psychology’s Feminist Voices (2018). Mary Whiton Calkins. Retrieved June 25, 2018. Available at http://www.feministvoices.com/mary-whiton-calkins/
  • American Psychological Association (2011). Mary Whiton Calkins, APA’s first woman president. Retrieved June 25, 2018. Available at http://www.apa.org/pi/women/resources/newsletter/2011/03/mary-calkins.aspx.
  • García Dauder, S. (2005). Psychology and feminism. Forgotten history of pioneering women in psychology. Narcea: Madrid
  • García Dauder, S. (2005). Mary Whiton Calkins: Psychology as a science of the Self. Athenea Digital, 8: 1-28.