Mary Whiton Calkins: biography of this psychologist and philosopher

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) was an American philosopher and psychologist, a pioneer in experimental psychology, and the first female 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 the participation of women in higher education and science.

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

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Mary Whiton Calkins: Biography of an Experimental Psychologist

She was born on March 30, 1863 in Hartford Connecticut. She was the 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 the year 1882 Calkins began her studies at Smith College for women, a year before the death of her sister Maud de ella; event that marked part of her subsequent formation. She stayed at home for a while, where she also took care of her mother, and she took private Greek classes. It was in the year 1884 when she returned to Smith College, graduating with honors in classical philosophy.

Two years later she traveled through Europe, where she took the opportunity to continue studying Greek. Upon returning to the United States, her father had prepared an interview for her at the newly created Wellesley College, a women's college in Massachusetts, where she sought to practice as a teacher and researcher.

Calkins and Wellesley's first psychology lab

In 1888, Mary Whiton Calkins became a professor of philosophy at Wellesley College for Women. At the same time, she opened the specialty of scientific psychology and the lack of teachers prepared to teach courses in it was recognized.

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

She accepted with the commitment to train in the area for at least a year. However, this generated a new problem: where to study. At the moment opportunities for women were almost nil and besides, Calkins had family commitments, so she didn't want to leave town.

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From “special student” to APA President

At Harvard University, and in a context where psychology and philosophy were not formally divided, but the participation of women in any case, there were several philosophers and psychologists who began to receive them as "listeners", both in their classes and in the laboratories. For example, William James and Josiah Royce were examples of faculty who did so, as they took a strong stand against Harvard's policies to exclude women.

In 1889 Mary Calkins began taking Physiological Psychology classes with James, and 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 laboratory at Wellesley college, which despite various barriers he achieved combined with the teaching.

At the same time, during 1984 and 1985, Mary Whiton Calkins trained at Harvard University and developed research that had an important influence on modern experimental psychology. All this even after Harvard University responded with a resounding refusal to her request to officially recognize her doctoral studies. Instead, she was offered recognition by Radcliffe College, which was the “annex” college of the same university. Calkins rejected the latter because she did not want to legitimize Harvard's lack of legitimacy of female students.

She went on to work at Wellesley College, as a teaching assistant, then a professor of psychology, and finally, the year before her her death and once she had retired, she was recognized as a professor-researcher, without official recognition of her doctorate by harvard.

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

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The Associated Pairs Technique and Self Psychology

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

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

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

The psychology of the self, for her, is a type of introspectionist psychology, which led him 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 concentrates on the contents of the consciousness and mental processes, and on the other hand, there is personal psychology that is based on the study of the self or the person. Calkins located her proposals within the latter, in turn divided into a biological and a psychological dimension, closely related to each other.

Through putting into dialogue different perspectives of psychology and philosophy, as well as the criticisms that received about her work, Calkins continued to develop and importantly update the psychology of self.

Her studies on the self were presented in 1900, and from there she published four books and more than 50 articles, which gave it a lot of prestige nationally and internationally. Among her most important works are the The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 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 Whitton Calkins. Retrieved June 25, 2018. Available in http://www.feministvoices.com/mary-whiton-calkins/
• American Psychological Association (2011). Mary Whiton Calkins, APA's first woman president. Retrieved June 25, 2018. Available in http://www.apa.org/pi/women/resources/newsletter/2011/03/mary-calkins.aspx.
• Garcia Dauder, S. (2005). Psychology and feminism. Forgotten history of pioneering women in psychology. Narcea: Madrid
• Garcia Dauder, S. (2005). Mary Whiton Calkins: Psychology as a science of the Self. Digital Athena, 8: 1-28.