Balancing life and work by unbending gender: Early American women psychologists’ struggles and contributions

Abstract

Women's participation in the work force shifted markedly throughout the twentieth century, from a low of 21 percent in 1900 to 59 percent in 1998. The influx of women into market work, particularly married women with children, put pressure on the ideology of domesticity: an ideal male worker in the outside market married to a woman taking care of children and home (Williams, 2000). Here, we examine some moments in the early-to-mid-twentieth century when female psychologists contested established norms of life-work balance premised on domesticity. In the 1920s, Ethel Puffer Howes, one of the first generation of American women psychologists studied by Scarborough and Furumoto (1987), challenged the waste of women's higher education represented by the denial of their interests outside of the confines of domesticity with pioneering applied research on communitarian solutions to life-work balance. Prominent second-generation psychologists, such as Leta Hollingworth, Lillian Gilbreth, and Florence Goodenough, sounded notes of dissent in a variety of forums in the interwar period. At mid-century, the exclusion of women psychologists from war work galvanized more organized efforts to address their status and life-work balance. Examination of the ensuing uneasy collaboration between psychologist and library scholar Alice Bryan and the influential male gatekeeper E. G. Boring documents gendered disparities in life-work balance and illuminates how the entrenched ideology of domesticity was sustained. We conclude with Jane Loevinger's mid-century challenge to domesticity and mother-blaming through her questioning of Boring's persistent focus on the need for job concentration in professional psychologists and development of a novel research focus on mothering.

Eugenics, social reform, and psychology: The careers of Isabelle Kendig.

“…In their studies of the second generation of women psychologists, Johnston and Johnson (2008, 2017) identified three ways that those careers differed from the ones of the previous generation (i.e., PhDs conferred before 1904). First, there were more opportunities for women to earn advanced degrees in established graduate programs.…”

“Making better use of U.S. women” Psychology, sex roles, and womanpower in post‐WWII America

“…However, the failure of the NCWP to persist as a women's organization, they argue, did not signal the failure of feminism in this period. Rather a close look at the strategies and tensions within the group indicates ongoing “latent, creative, and sometimes inadvertent strands of feminist subversion” among the women of the NCWP (Johnson & Johnston, p. 324; for other accounts of the NCWP, see Capshew & Laszlo, ; Walsh, ).…”

“…Their research was also informed by and arose out of the prominent cultural tensions surrounding women's dual roles as workers and mothers (see also Johnston & Johnson, this issue). The “working mother” of the 1950s was problematized at the same time as she became increasingly accepted and absorbed into a new economic and social order.…”

Family, friends, and faith-communities: Intellectual community and the benefits of unofficial networks for marginalized scientists.

“…A contemporary of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Sayers almost certainly would have been included in their unofficial intellectual community, The Inklings, had she been a man. Barred from official academic community by her gender, Sayers continued her literary and academic interests with the support of the Mutual Admiration Society, a writing support group composed of her Oxford women's college friends(Moulton, 2019).4 AsJohnston and Johnson (2017) noted, many male scholars rejected such nonwork responsibilities outright-E. G Boring (1938). stated that the requirement for eminence in psychology was 168 hours per week spent in psychology (i.e., every single hour of the week)!…”