Bonnie Ruth Strickland

Bonnie Ruth Strickland

 Biography:

On November 24, 1936, Bonnie Ruth Strickland was born in Louisville, Kentucky. Her parents were Willie Whitfield and Roy Strickland, who worked as railroad worker and housewife respectively, and she had a young brother. When Bonnie was eight years old, her parents were separated. To start a new life, Bonnie with her brother and her mother moved to Alabama at her age of ten. Even though she didn't live with her father, she often visited her father during her growth. Her family had a hard time when they were living in Alabama. To support the family, her mother worked as a waitress, and she had to responsible for the housework and took care of her brother and worked at a library when she was a teenager. Under this hardship, she learnt that she had to pay her tuition by herself because her family was unable to effort while she was attending college. When she was growing up, she devoted herself into playing tennis and softball. While she went to Alabama College for women, her passion for sports still continued that she was planned to become an athlete. However, during her Sophomore year, she decided to major in psychology, and she developed her interests on social issues, such as racial prejudice. She knew what she wanted to do when her professor made a comment said that "Look; the color is not skin deep," while her professor was scraping away skin from a cadaver of an old black man. In 1958, she went to graduate school in Ohio State University where gave her opportunities to understand more about the field of psychology and gave her opportunities to have clinical training in a Veteran Administration hospital. In 1962, after she received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, she accepted the job in Emory University. After two years of working as an assistant professor, she became a Dean of women, whose jobs were to deal with the problems that women had in her University. After many years, she accepted the position as a full time professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Following that, she became a member of Women Commitment, then she became the director of graduate studies of her department. From1976 to 1983, she finally elected as chair of psychology department.Until now, she is still working in University of Massachusetts, Amherst ( McHenry).   

Career Focus:

She is interested in the area of Gay and Lesbian psychology, health psychology, depression, clinical training, the locus of control, and the diversity and inclusiveness (MacKay).  

How her experiences shapes her psychology:

Bonnie's interests in the area Gay and Lesbian psychology are influenced by her identity as a lesbian. Also, she pays a lot of attention to the area of social justice. This has to do with her experiences of marginalization when she was young (MacKay). 

Major accomplishments:

In 1972, she chaired an American Psychology Association committee that she became the seventh woman president of APA. She advocated to research the discrimination in psychology and suggested to do that by looking women first. Furthermore, she was the third woman who was the president of the Clinical Division of APA, and the president of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Division. She achieved a great accomplishment on encouraging more women to pursue leadership position (MacKay). 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Major contribution:
She makes a great contribution to the area of social and personality psychology, the study of women and depression, and the psychology of gay and lesbians. Her contributions on these areas are important that she might be one of the few people who focus on these area. She explored that areas which no one or few people have been studies. Her behavior will encourage people to focus on the elements or groups of people that our society did not pay attention to. Also, her research on the locus of control reinforcement construct has a great impact on the psychology. The locus of control shows the importance of generalized expectancies, which helps to determine behavior of people, especially for the group of people who are poor and disadvantaged. To honor her accomplishment on this area, she has rewarded with two Citation Classic awards (Connel & Russo).

  

How her work fits into our class materials:

In our class materials, we had discussed the gender differences. Bonnie Ruth Strickland

perfectly showed to us that woman was as good as men that woman was not weak. Under the poverty, she did not give up pursuing her dreams. Instead of,  she bravely overcame those financial difficulties and converted the discrimination and marginalization which she experienced into stimulation, which stimulated her interests in the area of social justice. She didn't fit into roles that society defined for women, such as to be weak and subordinate. In our readings, we understand woman's position and experiences in our society. And, Bonnie advocates people to do researches on women, which before that most researches focused only on man. That will further explain why gender differences exist. 

References

Connell, Agnes N., and Russo, Nancy Felipe (1990). Women in psychology: a bio-bibliographic 

sourcebook. New York: Greenwood Press.
MacKay,Jenna (2010). Bonnie Strickland - Psychology's Feminist Voices. Psychology's Feminist 

  Voices. Retrived from http://www.feministvoices.com/bonnie-strickland/.

McHenry, R. (1985). Famous American women. New York: Merriam.

Norine Johnson

Norine Johnson

Biography

Norine Johnson was born in 1935 and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. As a child growing up during the Depression, she witnessed firsthand the struggles of the poor, which would have a profound influence on her. She also found inspiration from her grandmother, who had gotten married as a teenager, had four children, and lost her husband. Her grandmother’s success in raising four children alone, along with the living conditions she was raised in came to shape Johnson’s professional life. She attended DePaw University in Greencastle, Indiana and Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. From the latter school, she received a doctorate in clinical psychology. On November 19, 2011, she died in her home of breast cancer.

Work/Professional Life

Johnson spent much of her career focusing on the struggles of impoverished women, and how they tried to improve the lives of their families. After receiving her doctorate, she took part in a Harvard-sponsored program for two years. Johnson was involved in many psychological associations, including the Massachusetts Psychological Association and the American Psychological Association (APA), which she was the 9^th female President of. Throughout her career, Johnson received numerous awards, such as the Career Contribution Award from the APA in 1999.

Relevance

A lot of Johnson’s work focused on helping disadvantaged women. She worked hard to have a positive impact on the American health care system and its treatment of women and children. Johnson's work was beneficial to countless people who were in need, and her contributions to the field of psychology are undeniably significant.

References

http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/johnson.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22468786

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2011/12/01/norine_johnson_child_psychologist_studied_strong_women/

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=154667958

Posted by Shawn Gilbert

Anne Anastasi

Brief Overview

Anne Anastasi was born in 1908 as the only child of an immigrant family who lived in the Bronx.  Her father died at the age of one and she was raised by her Mother, maternal Grandmother and Uncle.  Her whole family had an interest in humanities and she was home schooled until nine years of age.  This upbringing gave her a natural intellectual curiosity and left her unaware of traditional sex role stereotypes.  Anastasi dropped out of high school, upset with the overcrowding and low academic standards, she went to Barnard College at Columbia University at the age of 15 since they didn't require a high school diploma.  She graduated Barnard in 1928 and began graduate work at Columbia University, which she finished in two years at the age of 21.

In 1933, Anastasi married John Porter Foley Jr., who she met in Columbia and also has a Ph.D. in psychology.  After a year into her marriage, she acquired cervical cancer and was left sterile.  She believed that this helped in her professional success as she did not have to worry about the complications of motherhood. 

On May 4, 2001, the 'Test Guru', as she was called, died at her home in Manhattan.  She was 92 years old. 

Work / Professional Accomplishments

 Anastasi taught at Barnard from 1930 to 1946 then spent the rest of her career at Fordham University in New York City. "Anastasi's research centered on the nature and measurement of psychological traits, specifically the role of experience in trait formation.  Whereas many trait theorists posited a strongly hereditary explanation for traits, Anastasi emphasized interaction of experience and culture with heredity.  Her 1958 paper, Heredity, Environment and the question "How?" challenged the psychological community to drop the nature vs. nurture debate and to instead ask how (do they interact)?  While the field had long been known a 'individual differences', Anastasi dubbed it 'Differential Psychology', a name she felt was more accurate" (Rodkey, 2010). 

In 1954, She was able to publish a textbook called Psychological Testing from her research, it was translated into many languages around the world and is still printed today.  The book introduced students to popular tests and the process of text construction and interpretation.  She also made significant contributions to the Mental Measurement Yearbooks series, which is a collection of psychological tests.  She was the only reviewer able to be a part of all eight original yearbooks.

Anastasi worked against the misuse of tests and testing terms such as "intelligence" and "IQ".  One misinterpretations of tests she tried to fight was the "culture-free" tests.  She knows no such thing can happen and the best we can do is make the test better reflect the target culture.

"Tests can serve a predictive function only insofar as they indicate to what extent the individual has acquired the prerequisite skills and knowledge for a designated criterion performance. What persons can accomplish in the future depends not only on their present intellectual status, as assessed by the test, but on their subsequent experience" (Anastasi, 1981). 

According to Anastasi, intelligence tests can do three things:

1. They permit a direct assessment of prerequisite intellectual skills demanded by many important tasks in our culture.
2. They assess availability of a relevant store of knowledge or content also prerequisite for many educational and occupational tasks.
3. They provide an indirect index of the extent to which the individual has developed effective learning strategies, probelm-solving techniques and work habits and utilized them in the past.

(Anastasi, 1981)

In the 1930's she and her husband, Foley, studied the cultural differences in art by looking at drawings by Native American children and in the 1950's took interest in language development of Black and Puerco Rican children.

In 1972 Anastasi was recognized by the American Psychological Association for her work and was elected as the organization's third president in history but the first one in the last 50 years. 

1985, Anastasi was awarded the National Medal of Science and named the move prominent living women in psychology in the English-speaking world.  She was uncomfortable with this title saying that she was simply a psychologist, not a "woman psychologist". 

"Despite her achievements, Anastasi remained modest, asking for only a calculator and a dictionary as retirement gifts, and maintaining that throughout her career she had simply followed her interested where they led," (Rodkey, 2010).

Relevance to Psychology of Women

Anastasi grew up with a gender neutral identity and when she entered the world was determined to make a difference in the way people view women.  Throughout her life she always fought against the stereotypes that women are given.  This was easier for her to do since she was never able to have children.  She analyzed the way tests were administered to people to different races, cultures, and genders and did what she could to make them more neutral, in turn making it easier to do studies since the data can be better correlated. 

Post by: Michael S. Geisel

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SOURCES

Rodkey, Elissa (2010). Anne Anastasi. Feminist Voices Retrieved from http://www.feministvoices.com/anne-anastasi/

Cohen, J. (2001). Anne Anastasi, third woman ever to head APA, dies at 92. Vol 32. No 8. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep01/anastasi.aspx

Goode, Erica (2001). Anne Anastasi, the 'Test Guru' of Psychology, is dead at 92. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/16/nyregion/anne-anastasi-the-test-guru-of-psychology-is-dead-at-92.html

(2012). American differential psychologist. Retrieved from http://www.intelltheory.com/anastasi.shtml

Mary Ainsworth

MARY AINSWORTH

By: Phaedra Graves

Brief Overview

Mary Dinsmore Salter Ainsworth was born in Glendale, Ohio in December of 1913 and died in 1999 at the age of eighty-six. She was the eldest of three girls. Both of Mary’s parents graduated from Dickinson College. Her father earned his master’s in History and was transferred to a manufacturing firm in Canada when Ainsworth was five years old. The family put a strong emphasis on education but Mary was especially inspired by William McDougall’s book, Character and the Conduct of Life. She enrolled in an honors program in psychology at the University of Toronto in the fall of 1929. She earned her B.A. in 1935, her M.A. in 1936, and her Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1939, all from the University of Toronto.

Work/Professional Accomplishments

Ainsworth taught at the University of Toronto for a few years before joining the Canadian Women’s Army Corp in 1942 during World War II. After the army, Mary returned to her alma mater to teach personality psychology and conduct research. She married Leonard Ainsworth in 1950. The couple moved to London so that Leonard could finish his graduate degree at University College. There, Ainsworth joined the research team at Tavistock Clinic. Here, Ainsworth was involved with a project investigating the effects of maternal separation on children’s personality development. Ainsworth and her team found evidence that a child’s lack of a mother figure leads to adverse developmental effects. She left the clinic in 1954 to do research in Africa. While in Africa, Mary and her colleague’s developed the Strange Situation Procedure, which is a widely researched and used method of assessing an infant’s pattern and style of attachment to a caregiver.

After two years in Africa, Mary and her husband moved to Baltimore where she began teaching at John Hopkins University and also provided psychological services to Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. She and her husband divorced in 1960 and she then relocated to the University of Virginia where she remained for the rest of her academic career. Ainsworth received many awards for her work in the field of psychology, including the G Stanley Hall Award from the APA for developmental psychology in 1984. She also received the award for Distinguished Professional Contribution to Knowledge from the APA in 1987 along with the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the APA in 1989. Ainsworth also published many articles and books, including Child Care and the Growth of Love (1965), Infancy in Uganda (1967), and Patterns of Attachment (1978). These publishing’s have been major contributors in increasing knowledge and awareness in the field of developmental psychology.

Relevance to Psychology of Women

As we have discussed in class, a woman can be defined in many different ways. One major way in which society categorizes and identifies womanhood is the act and duty of mothering. Women and mothering is part of the curriculum in Psychology of women and while Mary Ainsworth focused more on the infant and child’s experiences of the mother-child bonds, her work certainly ties into mothering and child rearing. In general, Ainsworth’s research on attachment has inspired large bodies of research dedicated to early childhood attachment.

References:

http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/ainsworth.htm

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesal/p/ainsworth.htm

Mamie Phipps Clark by Rachel Levy

Mamie Phipps Clark

 

 

Brief Overview

Mamie Phipps Clark was born in 1917 in Hot Spring, Arkansas and she died in 1983. Since she was black Mamie Phipps Clark was offered many scholarships.  She attended Howard University which is one of the two best predominantly black universities in the country.  There she obtained her bachelors and masters degrees.  Originally she was a math major minoring in physics. However, at school she met her future husband Kenneth Bancroft Clark who convinced her to major in psychology. This is because this field was more useful in finding employment and she always had an interest in the development of children.  Kenneth was also a psychologist who was famous for being involved in the Supreme Court Case Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka. Her master’s thesis discussed and concluded the fact that children become aware of their “blackness” in early childhood.  This research was useful in making “racial segregation unconstitutional in public schools (Psychology’s Feminist Voices, p 1).” Clark was confident that something could be done about this.

Personal/Professional Accomplishments

After obtaining her masters, Mamie Phipps Clark went to Columbia to obtain her PHD and she was the first black women to earn a doctorate degree at this school. Even though Clark graduated with a PHD from Columbia, it was very hard for Clark to find a job as a psychologist in the 1940s because she was black and a female.  However, after many unsuccessful job interviews she did not give up and eventually she found a position that would have a great influence on her work. This was a job as a psychologist at the Riverdale Home for Children in New York. Here she was able counsel homeless African American girls and conduct psychological tests on them.

At the time, Clark realized that there were a minimal amount of services available to minority youth in New York City. As a result, she took action in Harlem, New York by opening “The Northside Center for Child Development", which offered comprehensive psychological services to children of minorities including being black or poor.  She believed that a racist and racially segregated society led to decreased parental influence and care among minorities. Also biased IQ tests were given to black children that purposefully made these children feel inferior by giving black children retarded IQ scores. This led many black children to become frustrated, angry and worried. Dr. Cark’s studies with “children’s race recognition and self- esteem (Abramson, Brief Biographies)” showed that black children become aware of their racial identity at around three years old. However, when minority children went to the “Northside Center for Child Development” they were provided with a homelike environment and felt comfortable. This center provided education programs for children and parents, and helped them cope with behavioral and emotional problems. Mamie Clark was a very active person besides working at the Northside Center. She served on the advisory board of the Harlem Youth Opportunities Project with her husband Kenneth and the National Headstart Planning Committee. 

In addition, Mamie Phipps Clark and her husband Kenneth were famous for their doll studies which concluded that black children prefer to play with white dolls rather than black dolls. The Supreme Court Justices were impressed with this finding. Columbia University then rewarded the Clark’s with the Nicholas Murray Butler Silver Medal.

Relevance to Psychology of Women

            Mamie Phipps Clark led the way for women of minorities to be studied and counseled in psychology. She showed that tests on the IQ’S for minorities were biased. Her results showed that even though minorities might be inferior they are not retarded. This research showed that a women’s race does not determine her IQ. Also she was the first black women to get a PHD from Columbia, which would help start a path for other black women who wanted to get PHD. Overall her research expanded the field of psychology to not only studying white subjects.

References

http://www.feministvoices.com/mamie-phipps-clark/

http://psychology.okstate.edu/museum/afroam/bio.html

Melanie Klein

Background

Melanie Klein, born in Vienna in 1882, was an influential woman psychoanalyst whose work has had a lasting impression on the field today. By the time of her death of cancer in 1960, she had become a well-known figure in the world of psychology for her impact on developmental psychology. Though she originally had aspired to attend medical school, economic difficulties experienced by her family held her back. At the age of 21, she married for the first time and began a family which would later amount to three children. In 1910 she moved with her family to Budapest, having suffered from depression caused by a less than perfect relationship with her mother. While in Budapest she began studying psychoanalysis with Sandor Ferenczi, who encouraged her to attempt to psychoanalyze her own three children. Klein had to develop her own technique for this, because up until this point no one else had yet attempted to analyze children. The techniques that she created for this purpose are still used today, and much credit should be given to Klein as both a successful woman thinker as well a psychologist.

Melanie Klein developed a form of psychoanalysis called object relations theory, which states that the relationship between mothers and infants is the center of personality development. She developed a “play technique”, in which a child’s playful activities can be taken as symbols of unconscious thoughts and desires. In her technique, play activities are viewed and interpreted in ways which mirror the dream and free association interpretations that are used in the analysis of adults. Klein is thus credited for being the first psychologist to recognize that play is a meaningful activity for children, and this finding directly lead to the development of play therapy. She would spend the rest of her life developing such theories, and creating an entirely new school of psychoanalytic thought. She personally trained many of the first people who embraced her ideas and the concept of the “play technique”. Interestingly enough, Klein was the first psychoanalyst to diverge from Freud’s idea of psychological development while remaining a part of the psychoanalytic movement. Her work on the relationships between mourning and primitive defense mechanisms lead to her coming up with two fundamental developmental stages: the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive position. In direct conflict with the stages of development as described by Freud, Klein’s theories were subject to much debate. In the end, it was agreed that two schools of psychoanalytic thought would now be taught: Freudianism and Kleinianism.

Psychology of Women

Late in Klein’s life she experienced a falling out with one of her children, daughter Melitta. Her final studies and work included such themes of gratitude, envy, and reparation of the mother-infant relationship, and seem to reflect her search for answers to issues in her own life. Having experienced life as both a daughter and a mother, she was inspired to continue to develop her ideas further. Klein’s belief and emphasis on the role of the mother-child experience in an infant’s life has continued to have major influence on modern psychology today. In relation to the psychology of women, Klein’s research stressed the importance of the child’s relationship with his/her mother in reducing anxieties, depression, and fear in children.

Posted by Wade Carmichael 2013

http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/klein.html

http://psychology.about.com/od/profilesofmajorthinkers/p/klein_bio.htm

http://www.apadivisions.org/division-35/about/heritage/melanie-klein-biography.aspx

http://www.psych.yorku.ca/femhop/Melanie%20Klein.htm