Mary Whiton Calkins (; 30 March 1863 – 26 February 1930) was an American philosopher and psychologist, whose work informed theory and research of memory, dreams and the self. She developed the paired-associate learning technique and the theory of self-psychology. In 1903, Calkins was the twelfth in a listing of fifty psychologists with the most merit, chosen by her peers. In 1895 Calkins was refused a Ph.D. by Harvard University because of her gender even though she completed all the requirements. Calkins' experience at Harvard reflected the limited status of women in graduate education at the time, as they were often permitted to attend lectures informally but were excluded from official enrollment and degree recognition. She was given honorary membership of the British Psychology Association in 1928.
She taught psychology and philosophy at Wellesley College for four decades, and conducted research there and at Harvard University. At Wellesley College, Calkins established the first psychological laboratory for women. She later became president of the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association, and was the first woman to be president of both.
Background Mary Whiton Calkins was born on March 30, 1863, in Hartford, Connecticut. She was the eldest of Wolcott and Charlotte Whiton Calkins's five children in what was a close family. In 1880, when she was 17 her family moved to Newton, Massachusetts so her father, a Presbyterian minister, could take up a new jobBumb, J. (n.d.). Mary whiton calkins. Retrieved from http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/marycalkins.html .
In 1882, Calkins entered Smith College as a sophomore. She studied there for a year. Following the death of her sister in 1883, she took a year off from college and travelled to Greece where she received private tutoring. During this year, she also tutored two of her brothers.DiFebo, H. (n.d). Psyography: Mary whiton calkins. Retrieved from http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/marywhitoncalkins.html She returned to Smith College in 1884 and graduated that same year with a degree in classics and philosophy. Her academic background in classics and philosophy influenced her later work in psychology, particularly her interest in the concept of herself.
After graduation, Calkins and her family took an eighteen-month trip to Europe, and she was able to explore Leipzig, Italy, and Greece. During her travels she also tutored her two brothers and in Greece she spent several months travelling and studying modern Greek. When she returned to Massachusetts, her father set up an interview with the President of Wellesley College, an all women's college, for a tutoring job in the classics department. He was a strong supporter of her education, helping her access educational and professional opportunities at a time where women faced significant barriers. She worked at Wellesley as a tutor and eventually as a teacher for three years. A professor in the philosophy department noticed Calkins's excellent teaching and offered her a position to teach psychology, which was new to the philosophy department's curriculum. Calkins accepted the offer on the contingency that she would be able to study psychology for one year.Christopher Green (Producer). (n.d.). Katharine Milar on the first woman president of the APA, Mary Whiton Calkins. [Audio podcast]. This week in the history of psychology. Retrieved from http://www.yorku.ca/christo/podcasts/
Finding a psychology course that accepted women proved difficult. She considered psychology programs at the University of Michigan with John Dewey, Yale University with George Trumbull Ladd, Clark University with Granville Stanley Hall, and Harvard University with William James. She expressed interest in studying in a laboratory setting, a specification of which only Clark University and Harvard University had at the time. She sought admission to Harvard most likely due to its proximity to her home in Newton. Harvard did not permit women to study at their institution, but it allowed her to sit in on lectures after her father and Wellesley's president had sent letters asking for her admittance. Calkins decided to take classes at Harvard Annex (predecessor of Radcliffe College), taught by Josiah Royce.
Career Calkins published four books and over one hundred papers in her career, in both the fields of psychology and philosophy. Calkins was interested in memory and later in the concept of the self. . She is best known for her accomplishments within the field of psychology and her struggles to achieve. She was the first woman to serve as president of the American Psychological Association, marking a significant milestone for women in psychology. After being rejected for a degree from Harvard, Calkins continued to work and strive for equality. Her rejection reflected broader barriers faced by women in higher education, where they were often allowed to study but denied formal recognition for their work. Despite this, she continued her academic work in psychology and became a highly respected scholar in the field.
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 of merit.
Initial psychological training Royce influenced Calkins to take classes taught by William James in Harvard, with men as her peers. However, Harvard president Charles William Eliot opposed this idea of a woman learning in the same room as a man. With pressure from James and Royce, along with a petition from Calkins' father, Eliot allowed her to study in the classes, with the stipulation that she was a guest, and not a registered student.
Calkins began her serious study of psychology under William James, shortly after his highly renowned textbook, The Principles of Psychology, was printed in 1890. Calkins highly regards one of her first experiences with James in her autobiography, stating:
Although Calkins was very impressed by James' philosophies and he had initiated her into the field of psychology, James was not an experimentalist, and that was more of Calkins' area of interest. However, she claims that ultimately it was James' doctrines of the transitive feelings of relation, the feelings of and, if, and but, and the concept of consciousness as tending to the "personal form," which could have been what began her major interest in the self.
While studying with James, Calkins had first suggested attention as a topic for one of her papers, however, she said that James had frowned upon that since he was sick of the subject. Her topic of association was arbitrarily chosen, and became one of the major interests of her psychological career.
Experimental psychology Following her training under James, Calkins worked alongside Edmund Sanford of Clark University, who later assisted her in setting up the first psychology laboratory run by women at Wellesley College. Sanford trained Calkins on experimental laboratory procedures, as well as helped in the creation and assembly of numerous laboratory instruments for Wellesley's psychological laboratory.
When Calkins was tutored by Sanford, she was allowed to conduct a research project that involved studying the contents of Sanford and her dreams recorded throughout a seven-week period. She recorded 205 dreams and Sanford 170. They woke themselves by using alarm clocks at different hours of the night and recorded their dreams at the instant of waking. They slept with a notepad right beside their bed to allow note-taking of dreams as quickly as possible. Each morning, they studied all the records regardless of whether they seemed slight and trivial, or significant. They also took account of the different types of dreams and they discovered elements of various emotions.
As part of the project, also considered was the relation of the dream to the conscious, waking life, distinguishing the individuals and places in their dream experiences. Calkins explains in her autobiography that the dream "merely reproduces in general the persons and places of recent sense perception and that is it rarely associated with that which is of paramount significance in one's waking experience". Calkins and Sanford address the loss of identity in dreams as "not a loss but a change or a doubling of self-consciousness ... yet all the time one is conscious that it is oneself who has changed or whose identity is doubled". Their dream study involved a systematic self-recording method in which Calkins and Sanford recorded hundreds of dreams immediately upon waking, making it one of the earliest structured investigations of dream content and its relationship to waking experiences. Their findings suggested that dreams were closely related to recent waking experiences and reflected elements of everyday life.
Calkins' research was cited by Sigmund Freud when he created his conception of the dream. She also claimed that Freudians at the time were "superficially concerned with the 'manifest content' of dreams". The results of a recent study done by Montangero and Cavallero (2015) suggest that the consecutive events of the dreams of their participants were rarely plausible, and often seemed to have no relation to one another. This suggests that dreams have little hidden meaning, and supports the findings of Calkin's original dream study. These findings are consistent with Calkins’ broader research on dreams, which formed part of her work on psychology and mental processes. Her work is considered one of the earliest systematic studies of dreams, contributing to the scientific investigation of dream content.
Psychological laboratory and courses at Wellesley
In 1891, Calkins returned to Wellesley as an instructor of psychology in the philosophy department. 12 years after the first psychology laboratory was established by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, Germany, Calkins established the first psychology lab to be founded by a woman in 1891, and the first lab to be established at a women's college. Calkins had many of the apparatuses constructed at nearby venues. Her lab was in the attic spaces of the fifth floor of College Hall in Wellesley College. After the laboratory was established, it quickly gained popularity; her first course on "psychology approached from the physiological standpoint" yielded over fifty students. These students were instructed in some areas of psychology and conducted experiments on such subjects as sensation and association.
A fire broke out in a nearby physics lab in 1914, which destroyed Wellesley College hall, including Calkins's laboratory among with others. No students or instructors were injured in the fire, but the first psychology laboratory established by a woman was destroyed. The laboratory was rebuilt, and Eleanor Gamble later succeeded Calkins in running it.
Further education When Calkins began to make plans for furthering her education in psychology, advice from Sanford discouraged her from schools like Johns Hopkins and Clark, suggesting they were not likely to admit women as students much like her experience at Harvard. Sanford did encourage Calkins to explore sex programs in Europe, making an inference that Hugo Münsterberg admitted female students to his laboratory in Freiburg, Germany (after seeing a picture of Münsterberg in his lab with a woman). After expressing her desire to work with Münsterberg to James, she learned from him that Münsterberg would soon be coming to work at Harvard.
In the three years that Calkins studied under Münsterberg, several of her papers were published, including research she conducted with Sanford on dreams and her first paper on association. In her autobiography, she describes Münsterberg as "a man of deep learning, high originality, and astounding versatility."