"The Defects of His Race": E. G. Boring and antisemitism in American psychology, 1923-1953.

Winston, Andrew S.

doi:10.1037/10421-026

Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology. 2002

DOI: 10.1037/10421-026

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"The Defects of His Race": E. G. Boring and antisemitism in American psychology, 1923-1953.

Andrew S. Winston¹

Abstract: History amply shows that "good behavior" on the part of the Jew is by no means an insurance against anti-Setnitism.-Kurt Lewin (1940 By 1925, Edwin G. Boring (1886Boring ( -1968 was well established at Harvard as the "director of the Laboratory de jure and chairman of a nonexistent department de facto" (Boring, 1961, p. 46).' He worked grueling 80hour weeks to fulfill his administrative and teaching obligations. Boring Portions of this article were presented at the annual meeting of Cheiron, the International … Show more

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Cited by 14 publications

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References 23 publications

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“…It is only recently that Jews have been regarded as unambiguously "White." And for much of SPSSI's history, this ethnic group has had a marginal status both in psychology (Winston, 1998) and for society as a whole (Wilson, 1996). From the number of hate crimes documented regularly by the news media, negative views of Jews have not entirely disappeared today.…”

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confidence: 99%

Outsiders Inside: Positive Marginality and Social Change

Unger

2000

Journal of Social Issues

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This talk is a result of a number of questions that I have been thinking about for many years. (1) Why do many people acquiesce to beliefs that are harmful to themselves as members of devalued groups? (2) What kind of people resist collective stereotypes and attempt to change them (and, how can we increase their numbers)? (3) Is it possible for people to reframe a seemingly negative characteristic and use it as an agent of both personal and social change?Obviously, these questions cannot be answered simply: Any of them would require a book-length discussion (which would probably end with the comment that further research is needed). Today, I will argue that psychology has sought its answers from the wrong people and at the wrong level of analysis. Rather than focusing on laboratory studies of college students, I will examine some characteristics of SPSSI leaders in historical perspective. Data from a sample of self-selected activists indicates a complex interplay of internal and external variables. I will try to show that although demographics may predict marginality, consciousness determines whether marginality becomes activism.

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confidence: 99%

Outsiders Inside: Positive Marginality and Social Change

Unger

2000

Journal of Social Issues

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“…The role of anti‐semitism in hiring practices in psychology during that era has been strikingly documented by Winston, examining letters of reference written by well‐known psychologists, including E.G. Boring (Winston, ).…”

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“…Boring wrote to Bryan in a moment of uncharacteristic self-awareness, "I realize that it is a mean trick to babble along to you through a secretary when you have to do yours without a secretary"(Boring, 1945, p. 3)11 The role of anti-semitism in hiring practices in psychology during that era has been strikingly documented by Winston, examining letters of reference written by well-known psychologists, including E.G. Boring(Winston, 1998).12 After graduating from Smith in 1942, Friedan began further study of psychology at Berkeley, but, unlike Loevinger, Friedan decided against pursuing a career in academic psychology and turned down a prestigious graduate fellowship. In her autobiography Friedan describes psychologist Edward Tolman affectionately teasing Loevinger and Friedan, saying "Here come the career women"(Friedan, 2006, p. 59).13 This group is an example of a second generation response to professional marginalization that fits with Shields' identification of women's groups within the field that enacted, prior to the 1970s, feminist psychology as "transformational moments with a local flavor"(2015, p. 143).…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Johnston

Johnson

2017

J History Behavioral Science

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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.

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“…Letter from E. G. Boring to A. I. Bryan, January 31, 1945, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Archives, Alice I. Bryan Collection. For more on Boring's anti‐Semitism, see Winston ().…”

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

Rutherford

2017

J History Behavioral Science

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The relationship between American psychology and gender ideologies in the two decades following World War II was complicated and multivalent. Although many psy-professionals publicly contributed to the cult of domesticity that valorized women's roles as wives and mothers, other psychologists, many of them women, reimagined traditional sex roles to accommodate and deproblematize the increasing numbers of women at work, especially working mothers. In this article, I excavate and highlight the contributions of several of these psychologists, embedding their efforts in the context of the paradoxical expectations for women that colored the postwar and increasingly Cold War landscape of the United States. By arguing that conflict was inherent in the lives of both women and men, that role conflict (when it did occur) was a cultural, not intrapsychic, phenomenon, and that maternal employment itself was not damaging to children or families, these psychologists connected the work of their first-wave, first-generation forebears with that of the explicitly feminist psychologists who would come after them.

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"The Defects of His Race": E. G. Boring and antisemitism in American psychology, 1923-1953.

Cited by 14 publications

References 23 publications

Outsiders Inside: Positive Marginality and Social Change

Outsiders Inside: Positive Marginality and Social Change

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

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

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