Abstract:To date, the historiography on women in Canadian psychology has been relatively sparse. This is especially true in relation to the much more extensive literature that documents the history of first and second generation women in American psychology. The aim of this paper is to systematically identify and analyse the personal characteristics, educational experiences, and career trajectories of first generation women psychologists in Canada. We identify this cohort as women who received their PhDs during the per… Show more
“…Arnold's plaintive “All I ever wanted was to get a chance at research” (Arnold, n.d.‐a, p. 8) identifies her as a typical second‐generation woman psychologist (Johnston & Johnson, ; Gul et al, ) who saw herself as a scientist, rather than as a woman scientist. While neither Gasson nor Arnold were feminists, hints of Gasson's positive views of women can be seen in a letter in which he pushes back on Arnold's complaints about her unpromising Bryn Mawr students: O.K.…”
Section: Concluding Thoughts On Arnold and Gassonmentioning
Magda Arnold (1903-2002), best known for her pioneering appraisal theory of emotion, belonged to the second generation of women in psychology who frequently experienced institutional sexism and career barriers. Following her religious conversion, Arnold had to contend with the additional challenge of being an openly Catholic woman in psychology at a time when Catholic academics were stigmatized. This paper announces the discovery of and relies upon a number of previously unknown primary sources on Magda Arnold, including approximately 150 letters exchanged by Arnold and Father John Gasson. This correspondence illuminates both the development of Arnold's thought and her navigation of the career challenges posed by her conversion. I argue that Gasson's emotional and intellectual support be considered as resources that helped Arnold succeed despite the discrimination she experienced. Given the romantic content of the correspondence, I also consider Arnold and Gasson in the context of other academic couples in psychology in this period and argue that religious belief ought to be further explored as a potential contributor to the resilience of women in psychology's history.
“…Arnold's plaintive “All I ever wanted was to get a chance at research” (Arnold, n.d.‐a, p. 8) identifies her as a typical second‐generation woman psychologist (Johnston & Johnson, ; Gul et al, ) who saw herself as a scientist, rather than as a woman scientist. While neither Gasson nor Arnold were feminists, hints of Gasson's positive views of women can be seen in a letter in which he pushes back on Arnold's complaints about her unpromising Bryn Mawr students: O.K.…”
Section: Concluding Thoughts On Arnold and Gassonmentioning
Magda Arnold (1903-2002), best known for her pioneering appraisal theory of emotion, belonged to the second generation of women in psychology who frequently experienced institutional sexism and career barriers. Following her religious conversion, Arnold had to contend with the additional challenge of being an openly Catholic woman in psychology at a time when Catholic academics were stigmatized. This paper announces the discovery of and relies upon a number of previously unknown primary sources on Magda Arnold, including approximately 150 letters exchanged by Arnold and Father John Gasson. This correspondence illuminates both the development of Arnold's thought and her navigation of the career challenges posed by her conversion. I argue that Gasson's emotional and intellectual support be considered as resources that helped Arnold succeed despite the discrimination she experienced. Given the romantic content of the correspondence, I also consider Arnold and Gasson in the context of other academic couples in psychology in this period and argue that religious belief ought to be further explored as a potential contributor to the resilience of women in psychology's history.
“…Furumoto (1992, p. 175) explains that women were subject to “exclusionary forces” such as “the doctrine of separate spheres of activity for men and women” that hindered their participation in scientific psychology. Although the precise nature of such “exclusionary forces” varied somewhat across Anglophone countries (e.g., Gul et al, 2013), they were still a barrier to full participation in scientific psychology and likely explain the small number of women in our sample. Nonetheless, several of these 12 women are well-known to historians, including Phyllis Blanchard, Mary Whiton Calkins (who also appears in the Simonton list, above), Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Constance Ellen Long, Viola Paget (also known as Vernon Lee), Joan Riviere, Alix Strachey, and Mary Buell Sayles.…”
The digital humanities are being applied with increasing frequency to the analysis of historically important texts. In this study, the methods of G. K. Zipf are used to explore the digital history of the vocabulary of psychology. Zipf studied a great many phenomena, from word frequencies to city sizes, showing that they tend to have a characteristic distribution in which there are a few cases that occur very frequently and many more cases that occur very infrequently. We find that the number of new words and word senses that writers contribute to the vocabulary of psychology have such a Zipfian distribution. Moreover, those who make the most contributions, such as William James, tend also to invent new metaphorical senses of words rather than new words. By contrast, those who make the fewest contributions tend to invent entirely new words. The use of metaphor makes a text easier for a reader to understand. While the use of new words requires more effort on the part of the reader, it may lead to more precise understanding than does metaphor. On average, new words and word senses become a part of psychology's vocabulary in the time leading up to World War I, suggesting that psychology was "finding its language" (Danziger, 1997) during this period.
“…Initially, much of this historiography was made up of valuable autobiographical and biographical accounts of “women worthies” as a corrective to the “womanless” history that preceded it (Crawford & Marecek, 1989). This scholarship has given way to more nuanced and contextualized collective portraits (e.g., Gul et al, 2013; Johnston & Johnson, 2008; Morawski, 1994; Scarborough & Furumoto, 1987), musings on how replacing women in psychology’s history propels a critical analysis of the field (Bohan, 1990), and how attending to gender changes traditional historical narratives—sometimes radically (e.g., Hegarty, 2013; Nicholson, 2001, 2011; Rutherford, in press). Indeed, one important product of the pairing of feminism and psychology was the creation of a vibrant women’s and gender history, which includes active and ongoing efforts to preserve and disseminate women’s contributions and the life narratives of feminist psychologists (e.g., www.feministvoices.com).…”
Section: Bringing Feminism and Psychology Togethermentioning
In our introduction to this special issue on the histories of feminism, gender, sexuality, and the psy-disciplines, we propose the tripartite framework of "feminism and/in/as psychology" to conceptualize the dynamics of their conjoined trajectories and relationship to gender and sexuality from the late 19th through the late 20th centuries. "Feminism and psychology" highlights the tensions between a political movement and a scientific discipline and the efforts of participants in each to problematize the other. "Feminism in psychology" refers to those historical moments when self-identified feminists intervened in psychology to alter its content, methodologies, and populations. We propose, as have others, that these interventions predate the 1970s, the period most commonly associated with the "founding" of feminist psychology. Finally, "feminism as psychology/psychology as feminism" explores the shared ground between psychology and feminism-the conceptual, methodological, and (more rarely) epistemological moments when psychology and feminism made common cause. We suggest that the traffic between feminism and psychology has been persistent, continuous, and productive, despite taking different historically and geographically contingent forms.
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