Mary Whiton Calkins

Introduction

Mary Whiton Calkins (March 30, 1863 – February 27, 1930) was an American psychologist and philosopher who spent her entire academic career at Wellesley College. She is remembered for three things that are usually listed separately but are closely connected: she devised the paired-associates method for studying memory, she built one of the first psychology laboratories in the United States and the first at a women's college, and she developed a systematic "self-psychology" that made conscious selfhood the central object of the discipline.

Calkins was also the first woman elected president of the American Psychological Association, in 1905, and the first woman elected president of the American Philosophical Association, in 1918. Both elections took place while she was formally without a doctorate. She had completed every requirement for the PhD at Harvard, and the department's professors declared her examination the most brilliant in the university's history, but Harvard's president and governing board refused to confer the degree on a woman. The refusal has become one of the best-documented cases of gender discrimination in the history of American science.

She was a prolific writer as well as an experimentalist, publishing four books and more than a hundred papers on memory, dreams, association, consciousness and the self. Her contemporary standing is indicated by her ranking as one of the leading American psychologists of her generation in Cattell's 1903 reputational survey of American psychologists.

Early Life and Education

Calkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the eldest of several children in a family that took education for granted. Her father, Wolcott Calkins, was a Congregational minister with a taste for argument and scholarship; her mother, Charlotte Grosvenor Whiton, came from an established New England family. In 1880 the family moved to Newton, Massachusetts, where Calkins finished secondary school and where she would die fifty years later.

She entered Smith College in 1882, reading classics and philosophy, and completed her bachelor's degree in 1885 (a few sources give 1882; Smith's own records and most biographies favor 1885). Her studies were interrupted by family illness and by the death of a sister, during which she continued to read Greek at home. After a period of European travel and study, she was hired in 1887 to teach Greek at Wellesley College.

Within a year Wellesley offered her a new post teaching psychology, then still a branch of "mental philosophy" that was rapidly turning into an experimental science. The offer carried a condition: she had to spend a year acquiring formal training in the new discipline. Harvard was not admitting women, but the university agreed to let her attend seminars as a special guest, partly as a favor to her father and to Wellesley. Even that limited permission met resistance: male students dropped out of one seminar in protest. She studied with William James and the philosopher Josiah Royce, and worked experimentally with Edmund Sanford of Clark University, who helped her equip the laboratory she opened at Wellesley in 1891 in an attic room of College Hall. She returned to Harvard from 1892 to 1895 to work in Hugo Münsterberg's laboratory.

Academic and Professional Career

Calkins's doctoral examination in 1895 became the turning point of her career. James described it as the most brilliant PhD examination Harvard had seen, better than that of his junior colleague George Santayana. A committee of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology, including James and Münsterberg, certified by a unanimous vote that she had satisfied every requirement. Harvard's president, Charles William Eliot, who believed in separate education for the sexes, declined to award the degree. The department could only sign her dissertation as individuals, not as a faculty.

In 1902 Radcliffe College, the women's college affiliated with Harvard, offered doctorates to Calkins and three other women who had completed Harvard work but been denied degrees. The other three accepted. Calkins declined, writing to the Radcliffe board that although she would be glad to hold the degree and thought the Radcliffe doctorate would generally be regarded as Harvard's practical equivalent, she believed the best ideals of education would be served if Radcliffe refused to confer a degree Harvard withheld. Münsterberg urged her to accept; she did not change her mind.

Her teaching career continued regardless. She returned to Wellesley as associate professor of psychology in 1895 and became professor of psychology and philosophy two years later, holding the chair until her retirement in 1929. She taught Greek and classics as well as psychology, supervised the laboratory she had founded, and trained a generation of women students in experimental method at a time when most American graduate programs were closed to them.

Recognition came from outside Harvard. Columbia University awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1909 and Smith College an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1910; she was also the first woman elected to honorary membership of the British Psychological Society. She served as the fourteenth president of the American Psychological Association in 1905 and as president of the American Philosophical Association in 1918.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Paired-Associates Method

Calkins's dissertation research, published in 1896 as a monograph supplement to Psychological Review, introduced the paired-associates technique. Subjects studied pairs of items, typically a color paired with a number, and were later shown one member of the pair and asked to produce the other. The procedure could be run by the method of anticipation, in which the subject guesses before the pair is re-presented, or by the method of testing, in which order is shuffled between trials to prevent serial expectation.

Her findings were direct and, for their time, counterintuitive. Memory for the pairings depended above all on frequency of exposure: vividness of the color mattered far less than how often the pair had been encountered, a result that cut against the common assumption that sensory intensity drives retention. The method became one of the standard tools of verbal-learning research for most of the twentieth century and is still used in studies of associative memory, although Calkins herself regarded it as a minor part of her work.

Self-Psychology

From about 1900 Calkins argued that psychology should be defined as the science of the self, or more precisely of conscious selves in relation to their objects. Her system had three basal concepts: the subject, the object, and the relation between them. She drew on James's treatment of the material, social and spiritual selves and on Royce's claim that selves are constituted through communication with other selves. She was an introspectionist in the sense that she treated immediate experience as data, and she insisted that this data could be handled experimentally even though she did not herself run laboratory tests of self-psychology.

The system was never popular. Structuralism and functionalism were the competing schools, and both were hostile, and the emerging behaviorist program had no use for a self at all. Calkins argued in a 1917 paper, "The Case of Self Against Soul," that the self should not be confused with a substantial soul, and she attributed the neglect of self in introspective reports to the fact that one is so constantly aware of one's self that it is overlooked when reporting on a sensational experience.

Dreams and Association

Before her memory work, Calkins collaborated with Sanford on a study in which both recorded their dreams over several weeks, waking at varied intervals to capture them. The results suggested that dreams draw chiefly on recent people and places rather than expressing a hidden symbolic layer, a conclusion that was noticed by psychoanalysts and cited in early discussions of dream interpretation.

Equality of Education and Intelligence

Calkins was an early and explicit critic of the assumption that women's intellect differed from men's in kind. She argued that distinguishing a male psychology from a female psychology was as meaningless as distinguishing male food from female food, and she ran experimental comparisons of men and women on laboratory tasks, reporting no differences in the intellectual capacities measured. Her refusals of the Radcliffe degree and of segregated arrangements were consistent with this position.

Major Publications

Association: An Essay Analytic and Experimental (1896) — the monograph supplement to Psychological Review in which the paired-associates method is introduced, together with the finding that frequency of exposure predicts recall far better than the vividness of the material. Calkins regarded the method as a minor part of her work; the field disagreed.
An Introduction to Psychology (1901) — her principal textbook, and one of the first psychology textbooks written by an American woman. It is organised around her own self-psychology rather than around the structuralist or functionalist categories that were competing for the field.
The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (1907) — her major work outside psychology, arguing from the idealist position she shared with Josiah Royce that the problems of philosophy recur rather than accumulate toward solution.
A First Book in Psychology (1910) — a shorter textbook for beginners, and the vehicle through which self-psychology reached a wider student audience than her systematic writing ever did.
The Good Man and the Good (1918) — her ethical writing, connecting the self-psychology to a moral claim about how the self stands in relation to other selves, and the clearest statement of why she thought a psychology without a self was not a psychology at all.

Impact and Legacy

Calkins's technical legacy has outlasted her theoretical one. The paired-associates paradigm entered the standard toolkit of memory research, her Wellesley laboratory was a model for undergraduate experimental teaching, and her standing as the first woman to lead both the APA and the American Philosophical Association made her the reference point for later arguments about women's place in academic psychology.

Self-psychology did not survive as a school. It was criticized during her lifetime as unscientific, both because it relied on introspective reports and because critics saw the self as a philosophical or theological notion rather than a psychological variable, and it was overtaken after her death by behaviorism and later by cognitive psychology, which returned to questions of self and identity with methods Calkins did not have. Her defenders make two replies: that the dismissal was bound up with the exclusion of women from the institutions where reputations were made, and that her insistence that psychology must account for the experiencing subject anticipates later debates in consciousness research. Even sympathetic historians concede that her system generated few testable predictions, which is the immediate reason it faded.

The Harvard degree remains contested and unresolved. In 2005 a formal proposal by Kim Boatwright and Brian Nolan assembled archival evidence that Calkins had completed every doctoral requirement and petitioned for a posthumous degree; as of 2015 Harvard had declined, and it has not reversed that decision since. The refusal has been read in two ways. One view holds that a posthumous degree corrects a documented injustice against a scholar who earned it. The counter-argument, advanced by those who point to her own 1902 letter, is that she deliberately declined the substitute degree on principle and that honoring her now with a credential she rejected risks misrepresenting her protest. Harvard's own psychology department publishes a page acknowledging her as the originator of the paired-associate paradigm and as the first woman president of the APA, which supporters of a posthumous degree treat as an admission of the underlying claim.

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References

Calkins, M. W. (1896). Association: An essay analytic and experimental. Psychological Review Monograph Supplements, 1(2).