Mary Whiton Calkins: a biography of this psychologist and philosopher

Calkins was, in addition to being a brilliant researcher, the first president in the history of the APA.

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 among the social demands assigned to women, Calkins was one of the pioneers in the struggle for women's participation in higher education and science..

In this article we will review a brief 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.

She 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 siblings with whom she was very close. She grew up and lived in Buffalo, New York, and later in Newton, Massachusetts.

In 1882 Calkins began her studies at Smith College for women, a year before the death of her sister Maud, an event that marked part of her later education. She remained at home for some time, where she also took care of her mother, and took private lessons in Greek. It was in the year 1884 when he he returned to Smith College, and graduated with honors in classical philosophy..

Two years later he traveled in Europe, where he took the opportunity to continue studying Greek. When she returned to the United States, her father had prepared an interview for her at the recently created Wellesley College, a college for women in Massachusetts, where she sought to become a teacher and researcher.

Calkins and Wellesley's first psychology laboratory

In 1888, Mary Whiton Calkins began teaching philosophy at Wellesley College for Women. At the same time, the scientific psychology major was opening and there was a recognized lack of faculty prepared to teach courses in the major.

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

She accepted with a commitment to train in the area for at least a year. However, this created a new problem: where to study. At this time opportunities for women were almost nonexistent and, in addition, Calkins had family commitments, so she did not want to leave town.

From "special student" to president of the APA

At Harvard University, and in a context where psychology and philosophy were not formally divided, but 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. For example, William James and Josiah Royce were examples of teachers who did so, since they took a strong stand against Harvard's policies of exclusion of women.

In 1889, Mary Calkins began taking classes in Physiological Psychology with JamesJames, and Hegelian philosophy with Royce, at 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 she combined with teaching despite various barriers.

At the same time, during 1984 and 1985, Mary Whiton Calkins trained at Harvard University and developed research that had a major influence on modern experimental psychology. All this even after Harvard University responded with an outright refusal to her application for a grant. an outright denial of her request for official recognition of her doctoral studies.. He was offered, instead, recognition from Radcliffe College, which was the "annex" college of the same university. Calkins refused the latter because she did not want to legitimize Harvard's lack of legitimacy for female students.

She continued to work at Wellesley College, as an assistant professor, then professor of psychology, and finally, the year before her death and after she retired, she was recognized as a research professor, without official recognition of her doctorate from 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.. After her term, in 1918, she served as president of the American Philosophical Association.

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The technique of associated pairs and the psychology of the self.

His early work in psychology was 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 pairs technique" or "associated pairs task", currently used in cognitive assessment tests.currently used in cognitive assessment tests. Broadly speaking, it consists of the proposal that we can learn and memorize them pair by pair, until we are presented with a stimulus that results in the withdrawal of another.

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

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

Self psychology, for her, is a type of introspectionist psychology. a type of introspectionist psychologyThis led her to differentiate between two types of psychological systems. On the one hand there is impersonal psychology which tends to deny the Self when it concentrates on the contents of consciousness and mental processes, and on the other hand, there is personal psychology which is based on the study of the self or the person. Calkins placed 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 criticisms he received about his work, Calkins continued to develop and significantly update the psychology of the self.

His studies on the self were introduced in 1900, and thereafter he published four books and more than 50 articles. published four books and more than 50 articleswhich gave him much national and international prestige. Among his most important works are The Persistent Problems of Philosophyof 1907, The Self in Scientific Psychology of 1915 and The Good Man and the Goodof 1918.

Bibliographical 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.