Margaret Floy Washburn

Introduction

Margaret Floy Washburn (1871–1939) was an American psychologist who worked at the centre of a discipline that did not yet want women in it. In June 1894 she became the first woman to be awarded a doctorate in psychology, at Cornell University under Edward B. Titchener. She went on to write the standard English-language textbook of comparative psychology, to set out an ambitious motor theory of consciousness, to serve as the thirtieth president of the American Psychological Association in 1921, and in 1931 to become the first woman psychologist elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

She was also a figure of a particular historical type: a researcher who kept the study of consciousness alive during the years when behaviourism was making it unfashionable, and who argued that animal minds were a legitimate object of scientific inference at a time when the rising methodological orthodoxy held that only observable behaviour could be studied. That position put her on the losing side of one methodological revolution and the winning side of a later one, which is why assessments of her work have shifted rather than settled.

Early Life and Education

Washburn was born in New York City on July 25, 1871, and raised in Harlem. She was the only child of Francis Washburn, an Episcopal priest, and Elizabeth Floy Washburn, who came from a prosperous New York family of Dutch and English descent whose ancestors had been in America before 1720. She learned to read before starting school, advanced quickly once she did, and studied French and German. She graduated from high school at fifteen and entered Vassar College in 1886 as a preparatory student, a status she owed to gaps in her Latin. She graduated in 1891.

At Vassar she developed an interest in philosophy and, through it, in the new experimental psychology. Determined to work with James McKeen Cattell in Columbia University's newly established psychological laboratory, she found that Columbia did not yet admit women to graduate study; she was permitted to attend only as an auditor. Cattell treated her as a regular student, admitted her to his seminar and laboratory, and at the end of the year urged her to move somewhere that would actually grant her a degree. Cornell's newly organised Sage School of Philosophy admitted her in 1891 with a fellowship.

At Cornell she studied under Edward Titchener, then a young structuralist with few graduate students. Her experimental work used the method of equivalents in tactual perception, and she developed a thesis topic on the influence of visual imagery on judgments of tactual distance and direction. Vassar awarded her a master's degree in absentia in 1893 for that work. Titchener sent the dissertation to Wilhelm Wundt, who published a version of it in Philosophische Studien in 1895. She defended in June 1894 and received the degree.

Academic and Professional Career

Washburn's early appointments followed the only path then open to a woman of her training. She was offered the chair of psychology, philosophy, and ethics at Wells College in Aurora, New York, and spent six years there. In 1900 she moved to the Sage College of Cornell as warden, and in 1902 to the University of Cincinnati as assistant professor of psychology with full charge of the department, a post she left after a single year.

In 1903 she returned to Vassar as assistant professor of philosophy; from 1907 her title was in psychology, and she was promoted to professor in 1908. She stayed until her retirement in 1937, building an undergraduate research culture in a women's college that had no graduate programme and mentoring students — many of them women who would otherwise have had no route into laboratory work — through a substantial body of published research. One account credits her with guiding sixty-eight undergraduate psychological papers.

Her professional standing grew steadily. She translated Wundt's Ethical Systems into English. She edited Psychological Bulletin from 1909 to 1915, served as advisory editor of Psychological Review from 1916 to 1930, and in 1925 became one of four co-editors of the American Journal of Psychology. She was elected the thirtieth president of the American Psychological Association in 1921 — the second woman to hold the office, after Mary Whiton Calkins, who had been denied a Harvard doctorate for being a woman. In 1927 she was elected vice president and chairman of Section 1 (Psychology) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1931 she served as a United States delegate to the International Congress of Psychology in Copenhagen.

There is a sharp irony in her relationship with the experimenters' establishment. Titchener, her own doctoral supervisor, excluded women from the Society of Experimental Psychologists when he founded it in 1904, on the stated ground that their presence would inhibit frank discussion among the men. Several later accounts nevertheless describe Washburn as the first woman elected to that society; the two claims are not easy to reconcile from available records, and the discrepancy is worth flagging rather than smoothing over.

She never married, a decision shaped by the norms of the era: married women were generally expected to leave teaching. A stroke in 1937 ended her career, and she died in Poughkeepsie on October 29, 1939.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Comparative psychology and The Animal Mind

The Animal Mind: A Textbook of Comparative Psychology (1908) was the first systematic textbook of its kind by an American and remained the standard work in the field for about twenty-five years, running through four editions to 1936. Washburn surveyed experimental work on perception, learning, and consciousness across more than a hundred species and imposed methodological order on a literature that had been heavy on anecdote. Her central arguments were that animal minds are knowable only by disciplined inference from behaviour, that the same inference underwrites our belief in other human minds, and that the difference between human and animal mentality is one of degree rather than of kind.

The motor theory of consciousness

In Movement and Mental Imagery: Outlines of a Motor Theory of the Complexer Mental Processes (1916), the book she regarded as her best, Washburn proposed that thought is never detached from the body. The theory holds that consciousness arises from tension between competing movement tendencies; that sensory impressions and memories evoke faint, incipient movements of the eyes, lips, and vocal apparatus as well as subtler internal responses; that learning binds movements into regular series; and that thinking is therefore a derivative of motor processes. Emotion, on this account, is a readiness to act. The theory was an attempt to bridge structuralism, which studied consciousness, and behaviourism, which studied movement, by treating them as two aspects of one system.

Method: neither anthropomorphism nor mechanomorphism

Washburn's methodological stance was as influential as any specific finding. She rejected both of the available extremes: the sentimental attribution of human mental states to animals, and the reflex-machine view that dismissed animal experience altogether. What she proposed instead — observe closely, compare across species, and remain explicit about what behaviour can and cannot prove — became the working norm of comparative psychology.

Empirical range

Across her career she published on spatial perception, memory, individual differences, colour vision in animals, aesthetic preference, after-images, and affective processes. Estimates of her output vary widely, from roughly 127 papers to nearly two hundred items including reviews; the discrepancy reflects different counting rules rather than any dispute about her productivity.

Major Publications

The Animal Mind: A Textbook of Comparative Psychology (1908; fourth edition 1936) — the first systematic American textbook of comparative psychology and the standard text in its field for a quarter-century.
Movement and Mental Imagery: Outlines of a Motor Theory of the Complexer Mental Processes (1916) — the fullest statement of her motor theory of consciousness and the work she herself rated most highly.
"Some Recollections," her autobiographical essay in Carl Murchison's A History of Psychology in Autobiography, volume 2 (1932) — the principal primary source on her training and career.
English translation of Wilhelm Wundt's Ethical Systems.

Impact and Legacy

A 2002 survey by Haggbloom and colleagues, published in Review of General Psychology, ranked Washburn as the eighty-eighth most frequently cited psychologist of the twentieth century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, and Robert S. Woodworth. That is a respectable placing and also a fair measure of her position: significant, cited, but not among the names that define the century.

The criticism of her work is specific and well documented. Her motor theory never became a dominant framework. By the time Movement and Mental Imagery appeared in 1916, behaviourism was in the ascendant and the version of motor theory she inherited from Hugo Münsterberg was already losing ground; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that her imagery theory, like the similar one proposed by Knight Dunlap, failed to attract adherents and was largely forgotten until enactive approaches re-emerged much later. Two reasons are usually given. The first is that the theory was tied to the physiological vocabulary of its day, and later cognitive science approached thought through computation and neural mechanisms rather than through movement. The second is methodological: her reliance on introspection and her resistance to behaviourism placed her with the movement that lost, and introspective reports were in fact unreliable in ways behaviourists correctly identified.

There is a documented defence, and it is not merely sentimental. Jacobson's electrophysiological work in 1932 gave the theory some corroboration, and Washburn's ideas helped motivate research from the 1930s onward into mental practice of motor skills, a literature that is now extensive in sport psychology even though its effect sizes remain contested. More broadly, contemporary embodied-cognition research — which measures exactly the kind of subtle motor activation Washburn inferred a century ago — has given her account something of a second life, and the discovery of mirror neurons has a family resemblance to her claims about the motor encoding of observed action. Her comparative work has fared better still: her insistence that animals have conscious experience, rejected by strict behaviourists, is closer to the current consensus than the behaviourist alternative was.

The other criticism is structural rather than theoretical, and it concerns how she has been remembered. Washburn is often reduced to a milestone — the first woman with a psychology PhD — and that framing can obscure the substance of her work. Her career was also materially constrained: Columbia would not enrol her, women's colleges lacked graduate laboratories, and pay and promotion were unequal. Recognising that is not the same as reducing her achievement to gender; she built a research programme under conditions that limited its reach, and the programme itself, not only the barrier, deserves assessment.

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References

Washburn, M. F. (1908). The Animal Mind. Macmillan.