Maintaining Masculinity in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Psychology: Edwin Boring, Scientific Eminence, and the “Woman Problem”

Women's participation in the work force shifted markedly throughout the twentieth century, from a low of 21 percent in 1900 to 59 percent in 1998. The influx of women into market work, particularly married women with children, put pressure on the ideology of domesticity: an ideal male worker in the outside market married to a woman taking care of children and home (Williams, 2000). Here, we examine some moments in the early-to-mid-twentieth century when female psychologists contested established norms of life-work balance premised on domesticity. In the 1920s, Ethel Puffer Howes, one of the first generation of American women psychologists studied by Scarborough and Furumoto (1987), challenged the waste of women's higher education represented by the denial of their interests outside of the confines of domesticity with pioneering applied research on communitarian solutions to life-work balance. Prominent second-generation psychologists, such as Leta Hollingworth, Lillian Gilbreth, and Florence Goodenough, sounded notes of dissent in a variety of forums in the interwar period. At mid-century, the exclusion of women psychologists from war work galvanized more organized efforts to address their status and life-work balance. Examination of the ensuing uneasy collaboration between psychologist and library scholar Alice Bryan and the influential male gatekeeper E. G. Boring documents gendered disparities in life-work balance and illuminates how the entrenched ideology of domesticity was sustained. We conclude with Jane Loevinger's mid-century challenge to domesticity and mother-blaming through her questioning of Boring's persistent focus on the need for job concentration in professional psychologists and development of a novel research focus on mothering.

Section: Alice Bryan: a Strategic Reconstructive Feministmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The 168 Hour Week: Iconclast Jane Loevinger's Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The 168 Hour Week: Iconclast Jane Loevinger's Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Balancing life and work by unbending gender: Early American women psychologists’ struggles and contributions

Johnston

Johnson

2017

“…For more on Boring's efforts to reinforce psychology as a masculine science and the strategies women psychologists (including Bryan) used to navigate it, see Rutherford ().…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Letter from E. G. Boring to A. I. Bryan, January 31, 1945, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Archives, Alice I. Bryan Collection. For more on Boring's anti-Semitism, seeWinston (1998).17 For more on Boring's efforts to reinforce psychology as a masculine science and the strategies women psychologists (including Bryan) used to navigate it, seeRutherford (2015).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Making better use of U.S. women” Psychology, sex roles, and womanpower in post‐WWII America

Rutherford

2017

Self Cite

The relationship between American psychology and gender ideologies in the two decades following World War II was complicated and multivalent. Although many psy-professionals publicly contributed to the cult of domesticity that valorized women's roles as wives and mothers, other psychologists, many of them women, reimagined traditional sex roles to accommodate and deproblematize the increasing numbers of women at work, especially working mothers. In this article, I excavate and highlight the contributions of several of these psychologists, embedding their efforts in the context of the paradoxical expectations for women that colored the postwar and increasingly Cold War landscape of the United States. By arguing that conflict was inherent in the lives of both women and men, that role conflict (when it did occur) was a cultural, not intrapsychic, phenomenon, and that maternal employment itself was not damaging to children or families, these psychologists connected the work of their first-wave, first-generation forebears with that of the explicitly feminist psychologists who would come after them.

“The difference being a woman made” Untold Lives in personal and intellectual context

Rutherford

Milar

2017

Self Cite

To mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Scarborough and Furumoto's classic work Untold Lives, and to honor the intellectual legacy of Elizabeth Scarborough (1935-2015), we introduce this special issue devoted to the histories of women, gender, and feminism in psychology. We provide a short biographical sketch of Elizabeth, highlighting her own marriage-career dilemma, then contextualize the publication of Untold Lives within the historiography on women in psychology at that time. We conclude by discussing intersectionality as an analytic framework for the history of psychology as a way to extend and enrich this historiography.