User:Hannah-23-19/Ruth Winifred Howard

Early life
Ruth Winifred Howard was born on March 25, 1900, in Washington D.C., to Reverend William J. Howard and Alverda Brown Howard, and she was the youngest of 8 children. Howard's father was tenured as the minister of Zion Baptist Church, and during his ministry, the church extended its influence and attracted more members. Meanwhile, Howard's mother praised education, which shaped Howard's life aspirations and career goals. As a child, Howard enjoyed reading and aspired to be a librarian, an ambition that was encouraged by her mother. Howard also considered her father's active community work as one of the main sources of her passion to help other people, influencing her to work with disabled children. In 1916, she graduated from the Historic M Street High School, now known as Dunbar High School.

Personal life
In 1934, she married Albert Sidney Beckham, whom she met when he was working at the institute of Juvenile Research. They moved to Chicago, Illinois, where Howard lived in until 1987. Beckham died in 1964, and their marriage was what she described as a "happy marriage with our profession as one of the bonds. In professional activities, as in marriage relations, we were partners”. After Beckham's death, Howard continued her work in Chicago as a consultant for children's programs at the Abraham Lincoln Center and Worthington and Hurst Psychological Consultants, a psychologist for the McKinley Center for Retarded Children. She worked on the Chicago Health Board Mental Health Division, and kept her private practice for another four years. She continued her community work and was an active member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority, until her death on February 12, 1997 in Washington, DC.

Education and career
After graduating from high school, Howard attended Howard University and was studying to become a librarian. However, she had a desire to help people with disadvantages and won a National Urban League fellowship at Simmons College. She switched her field of study to social work, crediting her transition to social work to her experience as a black woman and the “exposure to socially deprived” people. In 1921, she received her bachelor's degree and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she started as a social worker. Throughout her social work, her objective was to assist children in foster care and unemployed, uneducated women. However, the Chief Psychologist of Cleveland Board of Education encouraged Howard to pursue psychology. Shortly after, she went back to Simmons College and received her master's degree in 1927.

Howard received the Laura Spelman Rockefeller fellowship in 1929 and again in 1930. With this fellowship, she attended the Teacher's College and School of Social Work at Columbia University from 1929-1930 and studied child psychology at the Child Development Institute at the University of Minnesota from 1930-1934. Some of her role models at University of Minnesota included her mentor, Florence Goodenough, Mary Shirley, Edna Heidbreder, and Edith Brody.

In 1934, she received her Ph.D. in psychology and child development from the University of Minnesota.

Howard studied the development of triplets for her doctoral dissertation. One of her main conclusions was that triplets were less developed in general abilities compared to single children. She was awarded an internship at the Illinois Institute for Juvenile Research after receiving her doctorate and eventually began her own clinical psychology-based private practice. Howard was the first African American woman to receive a doctorate.

From 1940-1964, Howard co-directed the Center for Psychological Services with her husband, Albert Sidney Beckham. Before this, Howard interned and worked in different organizations and institutions that shaped her idea on working with young people. During this time, Howard also held the staff psychologist position at the Provident Hospital School of Nursing in Chicago, which trained African American nurses. Additionally, she held the position of a psychological consultant at Florida and Missouri schools of nursing while lecturing, working at psychology clinics, and consulting for other organizations.

From 1964-1966, she worked at the McKinley Center for Retarded Children as a psychologist. Afterwards, she worked at Worthington and Hurst Psychological Consultants as a staff psychologist until 1968, and then she became a psychologist for the Chicago Board of Health until 1972.

Howard pursued postdoctoral studies, collaborated with different psychologists, like Robert Havinghurst, conducted research, and subsequently published some of the studies like the “play therapy/interviews”, which was achieved thanks to her collaboration with Virginia Axline. Howard's doctoral research was on 229 triplet sets, with an age demographic ranging from newborns to 79 years old, making her work the most comprehensive study on triplets at the time. Throughout this study, Howard tracked development of the triplet sets longitudinally and compared three people from three different eggs, three people from the same egg, and two people from one egg and one person from another. Her research was also one of the first triplet studies to examine a variety of ethnic groups. This research was published in the Journal of Psychology (1946) and the ''Journal of Genetic Psychology. ''

Selected works and publications
Below are some works and publications on Ruth Howard's achievements and projects.


 * “A Study of the Development of Triplets”,
 * “Fantasy and the Play Interview”,
 * “Intellectual and Personality Traits of a Group of Triplets”,
 * “Developmental History of a Group of Triplets”.

Community organizations
Howard volunteered with the Young Women's Christian Association of Chicago and played a role in coordinating the National Association of College Women, an organization with African American roots. She was also a part of several professional organizations, such as the American Psychological Association, the International Council of Women Psychologists, and the International Psychological Association. She was also civically a board member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the National Association of Art Institute of Chicago.

Throughout her community work, Howard encouraged women psychologists, believing that they were important and played a large role in psychology and had the power to support other women psychologists.