Although mental tests had clear practical uses, they were also research tools. As research tools, they could be used in many ways. A few early female psychologists in the United States used these tests to conduct empirical studies of sex differences, establishing an inchoate version of the field we would now call psychology of women.
At the end of the 19th century, several beliefs about the differences between women and men were widely held in American society, and among psychologists. One view held that higher educa- tion for women would render them ‘‘functionally
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castrated’’ and that as their intellectual capaci- ties were nurtured their reproductive capacities would diminish. Lay people and scientists alike believed that women and men differed in the very nature of their mental traits and capacities, with women and men displaying complementary, but not directly comparable, psychological and intel- lectual strengths. This conviction was known as thecomplementarity hypothesisand was gen- erally used to enforce what were then considered appropriate social roles for men and women, with women excelling in the realm of the emotional, domestic, and private and men excelling in the realm of the rational, professional, and public.
These beliefs persisted despite the increase in women gaining access to higher education and careers and becoming economically indepen- dent. The late 19th-century cultural discourse surrounding this ‘‘new woman,’’ who was better educated, worldlier, and more autonomous, indi- cated both society’s enthusiasm for, and wariness toward, changing gender ideals.
One of American psychology’s ‘‘new women’’
was Helen Bradford Thompson Woolley (1874–1947). Born into a progressive family that strongly supported higher education for women, Woolley earned her PhD in psychology at the University ofChicago in 1900. For her doctoral research, she undertook the first large-scale experimental study of sex differences in mental traits, published in 1903 asThe Mental Traits of Sex.
Specifically, using many of the kinds of tests formulated byCattell, Jastrow, Galton, and oth- ers, she conducted an empirical investigation of the motor and sensory abilities, and intellectual and affective processes, of a group of 50 Univer- sity ofChicago undergraduates: 25 women and 25 men. To assess motor abilities, for example, she used reaction-time tests. To test for tac- tile sensitivity, she employed the discrimination of weights, among other methods. Her tests of intellectual faculties included memory and as- sociation tests. Instead of reporting the group averages for men and women on each task, Wool- ley graphed the distributions of test results by sex
and noted that in every case the curves almost completely overlapped. In addition, while she found a few reliable average differences between the two groups (e.g., on motor ability and puz- zle solving), men and women were more similar than different on most tasks. These similarities included her admittedly crude tests of emotion- ality, a trait believed to be highly sex typed. On tasks that did show reliable differences, Woolley cautioned strongly against hereditarian interpre- tations, arguing forcefully for a consideration of the ways boys and girls, men and women, were socialized differently and consistently encoun- tered radically different environments and social expectations.
One of the students most influenced by Woolley’s work was Leta Stetter Hollingworth (1886–1939). Hollingworth published numer- ous studies to debunk cultural stereotypes about
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women. For her dissertation, published in 1914 as
‘‘Functional Periodicity: An Experimental Study of the Mental and Motor Abilities of Women During Menstruation,’’ she conducted an em- pirical study to test the widespread belief that women’s mental and motor performance be- comes impaired during menstruation. Although her work drew less directly onCattell-like mental tests, thus reflecting some developments that had
taken place in testing during the first decade of the 20th century, her work was enabled by the tradition of empirical study of individual differ- ences in which mental tests played an important role. Based on the results of her study, she con- cluded, ‘‘Careful and exact measurement does not reveal a periodic mental or motor ineffi- ciency in normal women’’ (Hollingworth, 1914a, p. 94).
Sidebar 6.1 Focus on Leta Stetter Hollingworth
Leta Stetter Hollingworth was a woman of the Nebraska prairie who made her professional mark in the faraway environs of New York City. She was born on a farm near Chadron, Nebraska, the eldest of three girls. Her childhood and adolescence were marked by both great love and great loss, as her mother died when she was 3, and after 10 years with her loving maternal grandparents, she and her sisters were reclaimed by their neglectful father and his unsympathetic wife. Leta found escape through education. She completed high school at age 15 and enrolled in the University of Nebraska. There she discovered psychology and met her fellow student and future husband, Harry Hollingworth. After their graduation, Harry was admitted to doctoral work in psychology at Columbia University with James McKeen Cattell, while Leta taught school for two years. Their plan was to be married and for Leta to enroll in graduate school as Harry was completing his studies. However, it did not quite work out as planned. After Leta moved to New York, she discovered to her dismay that as a married woman she could not teach in New York schools. Leta had long aspired to be a writer, so she attempted to sell her stories to magazines, but with no luck. Harry’s salary at Barnard College was small, and the young couple was simply unable to do more than barely make financial ends meet. It appeared as though their dream of graduate education for Leta would not be fulfilled.
Fortuitously, an offer to conduct commercially- sponsored research came Harry’s way. Coca-Cola had been sued by the U.S. government for adding an unhealthy ingredient to its product. The ingredient was caffeine. The trial was set for mid-1911, and early that year the Coca-Cola Company realized that it did not have any psychological research evidence concerning the cognitive or behavioral effects of its product. After a hurried search, the company contracted with Harry to do the necessary work.
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Harry and Leta designed the study, a series of double-blind experiments in which neither the investigators nor the participants knew which participants received placebos or the active ingredients. Because Harry had to teach during the day, Leta actually led the experimental testing of participants, while Harry, Leta, and friends did the data analysis at night. The results were presented at the trial, and Harry reported that he had found no evidence of cognitive impairment as a result of the administration of Coca-Cola to the study’s participants.
For the couple, the major benefit was that the payment from Coca-Cola for their services provided more than enough money for Leta Stetter Hollingworth to enroll in graduate study in psychology at Columbia’s Teachers College. There, she earned her master’s degree in 1913 and her PhD in 1916. After earning her master’s degree, she also worked as a clinical psychologist (then primarily concerned with administering psychological tests) until 1920. She was hired in the educational psychology program at Teachers College after the completion of her doctoral degree and remained there for the rest of her career.
Hollingworth’s clinical work made her aware of the challenges faced by children at both ends of the ability spectrum. Her published work on adolescence and on gifted children became standard texts in the respective fields for many years. She also was a key contributor to two special programs for exceptional children in the New York public schools. Hollingworth contributed to clinical psychology in other ways as well. She was one of the organizers of the first professional association of clinical psychologists, the American Association of Clinical Psychology, formed in 1917. And in 1918, she published the first call for a professional degree in clinical psychology, anticipating the creation of the PsyD degree by 50 years.
Hollingworth also compiled and analyzed available empirical evidence to debunk the variability hypothesis, a popularly held, evolutionary-inspired belief that the male of the species always demonstrates more variability than the female across both physical and psycho- logical traits and therefore drives evolutionary progress. According to this view, men were more likely to occupy the uppermost, as well as the lowermost, ranks in the distribution of any trait.
This was used to explain why men’s intellectual achievements and eminence were apparently greater than those of women. In her review of the data pertaining to the variability hypothesis, Hollingworth (1914b) concluded, ‘‘The empir- ical data at present available on this point are inadequate and contradictory, and if they point either way, actually indicate greater female vari- ability’’ (p. 529). Furthermore, she pointed out thateven if there were greater male variability,
this fact would be impossible to interpret until women were able to participate equally with men in the fields in which eminence was possible.
Hollingworth pointed out that the realms to which many women were limited (i.e., mother- hood and domesticity) were not those in which eminence was ever considered or evaluated.
Thus, in the hands of some women scientists, these tests were used to empirically challenge, rather than support, commonly held and often sexist beliefs about women’s inferiority. Like Woolley before her, Hollingworth emphasized the differential effects of environment, culture, and social expectations on men and women in any explanation of presumed or demonstrated sex differences.
In the period after World War I, with the rise of applied psychology and the proliferation of testing in many settings, women psychol- ogists were increasingly funneled into applied
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positions. Whereas the involvement of women psychologists in the applied efforts of the war was practically nonexistent, this changed as the field continued to professionalize in the postwar years. As historian of science Margaret Rossiter noted in the first volume of her pivotal work on women scientists in America (1982), only two women, Mabel Fernald and MargaretCobb, were listed as being involved in the World War I test- ing program of Robert Yerkes (1876–1956), and although they were staff psychologists at their institution, they were listed as assistants. Thus, women did not benefit professionally from con- nections made during the war. After the First World War, as applied work took off, a separate sphere of women’s work in psychology rapidly developed. This was partly because although the number of new academic departments and po- sitions was growing in the 1920s, so too was the number of PhD psychologists, both men and women. Men generally received first considera- tion for academic jobs and quickly occupied most available posts. Women were advised to use their training in clinical, vocational, or school settings and came to outnumber men in the latter. Napoli, in his history of applied psychology (1981), noted that by 1930, men made up two-thirds of the PhDs in psychology but only a small minority of the applied branch. Thus, applied psychol- ogy was clearly considered women’s work, and women were remarkably resourceful in using their training in various settings, from juvenile courts to state reformatories, private schools, and child guidance clinics.