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.
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