Although rarely given credit, women have been contributing to psychology since its inception as a field of study. In 1894, Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman awarded the doctoral degree in psychology. She wrote The Animal Mind: A Textbook of Comparative Psychology, and it was the standard in the field for over 20 years. In the mid 1890s, Mary Whiton Calkins completed all requirements toward the PhD in psychology, but Harvard University refused to award her that degree because she was a woman. She had been taught and mentored by William James, who tried and failed to convince Harvard to award her the doctoral degree. Her memory research studied primacy and recency (Madigan & O’Hara, 1992), and she also wrote about how structuralism and functionalism both explained self-psychology (Calkins, 1906).
Another influential woman, Mary Cover Jones, conducted a study she considered to be a sequel to John B. Watson’s study of Little Albert (you’ll learn about this study in the chapter on Learning). Jones unconditioned fear in Little Peter, who had been afraid of rabbits (Jones, 1924).
Ethnic minority women contributing to the field of psychology include Martha Bernal and Inez Beverly Prosser; their studies were related to education. Bernal, the first Latina to earn her doctoral degree in psychology (1962) conducted much of her research with Mexican American children. Prosser was the first African American woman awarded the PhD in 1933 at the University of Cincinnati (Benjamin, Henry, & McMahon, 2005).
The content of this course has been taken from the free Psychology textbook by Openstax