Florence Goodenough and child study: The question of mothers as researchers

Historical Aspects and Test Characteristics of Eponymously Named Psychometric Tests by Women: The Period up to 1970

Background: Prior to 1970, women authored or co-authored a variety of eponymously named psychometric tests predominately in children and young adults with developmental and behavioral disorders. Gaps remain in understanding and appreciating the extent of their contributions to these psychometric tests.

Methods: Two authors adjudicated psychometric tests in the text, Tests in Print, to identify those eponymously named after women. To be eligible for this study, the psychometric test title must contain the name of a woman and be published prior to 1970. If a woman published more than one eponymously named test, the earliest one, if available, was chosen to be included in this study. A search for individual and a combination of related Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) keywords of the “name of the women author” and “name of the test” was performed using the Google web browser, PubMed, APA PsycNet, and APA PsycInfo from inception to August 1, 2021. Further papers were identified using bibliographic search from source papers and reference books.

Results: Three hundred eighty-six eponymously named psychometric tests were identified, with 124 (32%) of them named in whole or in part by or for a woman. Of these 124 psychometric tests, 93 represent unique women’s names. Before 1970, there were twenty-three (19%) eponymously named psychometric tests with women, with twenty-one (17%) representing unique women’s names.

Conclusion: These tests were published by women whereby they served either as a single author or in collaboration with others or their spouse. In the latter case, the woman’s name universally appeared after their husband’s name. In only a few cases, are these women’s names well-referenced in biographical source materials. These women made essential contributions to the development and revision of psychometric tests and the field of psychology in general.

Women Across the History of Cross-Cultural Psychology: Research and Leadership

Across the years as interest in culture grew in the field of psychology, women contributed to its growth by leading research into new areas, such as children’s socialization and family dynamics, and acknowledging the critical role of the social and environmental context. Moreover, women were significant partners in team-led projects, developing methodologies that have been successfully employed to study cultural similarities and differences. Women have expanded psychological research in many domains, investigating the role of culture in cognitive areas, such as perceptual learning, cognition, and languages, as well as in social areas such as cultural stereotypes, acculturation, self-construal, attributions, and human development. Women have also investigated appropriate psychometric testing for valid assessments, critical for establishing equivalence in cross-cultural research. As women’s research voices grew, they have slowly advanced into important roles in academic organizations, such as IACCP. Although men continue to dominate leadership positions in IACCP and other similar organizations, women have become more visible in recent years. Indeed, women have made important research and leadership contributions to the growth and direction of cross-cultural psychology, and they will certainly continue to do so in the future.

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

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.