User:Rboateng/sandbox

Mary Whiton Calkins (1863-1930) is known as one of the most eminent women psychologist.

Early Life and Education
Mary Whiton Calkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1863 to Reverend Wolcott Calkins; a Protestant minister and Charlotte; she was the eldest of five children, and grew up in Buffalo, New York. In 1881 the Calkins family moved to Newton, Massachusetts where she began her education. Calkins was close to her family, especially her mother Charlotte, which was the norm for American middle-class woman. Her closeness with her mother grew stronger when Charlotte was experienced a complete emotional and physical collapse after years of caring for her children’s grave childhood illnesses. In 1882 Calkins left home to attend Smith College at the sophomore level, where she concentrated in philosophy and classics.

After completing her undergraduate studies the entire Calkins family moved to Europe where Mary Whiton Calkins studied language. The family returned to returned to New England in September 1887, where Calkins received the opportunity to teach Greek at Wellesley College. Calkins accepted this position and spent the majority of her life at the college. She worked as a teacher until a fellow faculty member recommended to the college president that Calkins should be appointed a newly created position in experimental psychology. Before Calkins could be appointed this position she had to study the subject for a year, but this was a difficult task because during this time neither Clark University, where she was tutored by Edmund C. Sanford nor Harvard, where she was recognized by William James as an outstanding student, granted admission.

Once Calkins returned to Wellesley in 1891, she opened a psychological laboratory where she trained hundreds of students. In need of enhancing her study Calkins returned to Harvard where she worked in the psychological laboratory of Hugo Münsterberg. Just like Christine Ladd-Franklin, Calkins was denied a Ph.D. from Harvard even though she completed all the requirements.

Dream Research
When Calkins was tutored by Sanford, she was given the opportunity to conduct a research project that involved studying the contents of Sanford and her dreams recorded during a seven-week period. She recorded 205 dreams and Sanford 170. While analyzing these dreams Calkins concluded that there was a “close connection between the dream-life and the waking-life." Calkins research was cited by Sigmund Freud when he created his conception of the dream.

Self-Psychology
One of her prominent contribution to psychology was her system of self-psychology. In a time where there were several schools of thoughts, Calkins established the school of the ‘self-psychologist.’ Self-psychology was influenced by the works of James Baldwin and Josiah Royce, two people who influenced her during her studies at Harvard. Calkins self-psychology explains that the self is an active agent acting consciously and purposefully.

While at Harvard, Calkins invented the paired-associate technique, a research method where colors are paired with numbers, and the colors are presented again for recall. In 1903, Calkins ranked twelfth in a listing of fifty top-ranked psychologists, an achievement that happened after James McKeen Cattell asked ten psychologists to rank their American colleagues in order merit. In 1905 she was elected president of the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association in 1918. This was a great achievement because she was the first woman to hold a position in both societies. In 1909 she received an honorary degree from Columbia University and another one in 1910 from Smith. She was also the first woman elected to honorary membership on the British Psychological Association. Calkins served as a faculty member at Wellesley College for forty years until she retired in 1929. Calkins died in 1930 after writing four books and over a hundred papers that are evenly divided between the fields of psychology and philosophy.