In 1895, a six-member examining committee unanimously concluded that 32-year-old Mary Whiton Calkins had completed her psychology and philosophy studies with distinction and satisfied the requirements for a PhD. Prominent psychologist William James, who examined her, described it as “the most brilliant examination for the PhD that we have had at Harvard.” It didn’t matter. Harvard didn’t award doctorates to women and wasn’t inclined to make an exception even for a scholar whom her professors considered one of the strongest psychology students the university had trained. Calkins would spend the rest of her career as one of the most decorated psychologists in the country, without the credential she’d earned.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1863, Calkins was raised in a household that treated intellectual development as a given. Her father, a Presbyterian minister, personally oversaw his children’s education. Calkins studied classics and philosophy at Smith College, graduating in 1885. After spending eighteen months in Europe with her family—during which she studied modern Greek and tutored her brothers—she became a tutor in Greek at Wellesley College in 1887. She might easily have settled into a conventional teaching post. Instead, when Wellesley decided to offer a psychology course, Calkins was offered the job on the condition that she acquire the background training. She considered a number of opportunities, both in Germany and in the US, but ultimately went looking for the best place to get laboratory-based training near her family.
Harvard was closest to her family home in Newton, so that’s where Calkins. Her father and Wellesley’s president both wrote letters on her behalf, and she initially arranged to study through the Harvard Annex, the precursor to Radcliffe College, where Harvard professors taught courses for women. With support from James and philosopher Josiah Royce, she then secured special permission to attend Harvard graduate seminars as a guest rather than an enrolled student. She also received private experimental training from Edmund Sanford at Clark University. When the other students withdrew from James’s seminar, Calkins became his sole student.
“The student trained to reach decisions in the light of logic and of history will be disposed to recognize that, in a democratic country governed as this is by the suffrage of its citizens and given over as this is to the principle and practice of educating women, a distinction based on difference of sex is artificial and illogical, and thus suspicious.”
Mary Whiton Calkins, February 8, 1906 address at the 38th annual National Sufferage Convention
After returning to Wellesley in 1891 and establishing its psychology laboratory, Calkins sought further experimental training. In 1892, she received permission to work in German-American psychologist Hugo Münsterberg’s Harvard laboratory, where she spent three years working on the dissertation research that would become the paired-associate technique—participants learned pairs of items and were later shown one member of each pair as a cue for recalling the other. Her technique became a standard tool in research on learning and memory.
By any ordinary measure, her dissertation and the exam that followed should have earned Calkins a Harvard PhD. James’s own praise made that plain, and the six-member examining committee unanimously recommended that she receive the degree, But the Harvard Corporation held the line, and Calkins left Harvard in 1895 the same way she’d arrived: unofficially.
The Degree She Wouldn’t Take
Seven years later, a compromise was offered that stopped short of awarding Calkins the Harvard degree she had earned. In 1902, Radcliffe College—Harvard’s affiliated women’s college—offered doctoral degrees to Calkins and three other women who had completed graduate work with Harvard professors without receiving Harvard degrees.
Calkins turned it down. It would have seemed like a bit of a condescension to be offered a degree from Radcliffe, awarded for work actually done at Harvard, under distinguished Harvard faculty, in a groundbreaking, prestigious program.
When the other three women accepted, Calkins didn’t criticize their decision but believed that work completed at Harvard and judged by Harvard professors should be recognized with a Harvard degree, regardless of the student’s sex. She wrote that she believed “the best ideals of education would be better served if Radcliffe College refused to confer the doctor’s degree.” Taking a substitute credential might have been the easier path. But it was one her principles wouldn’t let her take.
The refusal didn’t prevent her from building an eminent career, although Calkins acknowledged the missing credential occasionally caused professional inconvenience. But it was undeniable by that point that Mary Whiton Calkins had established herself. She’d returned to Wellesley in 1891, before her Harvard studies had even concluded, and founded a psychological laboratory there—one of the first in the country and the first at an American women’s college. She stayed at Wellesley for nearly forty years, teaching, publishing, and building a research program that reached well beyond the memory studies that had gotten her started.
A Different Kind of Psychology
Calkins’s paired-associate technique alone would have secured her a footnote in the textbooks, but her next area of development established her as a full-fledged theorist. As early twentieth century psychology divided among structuralist, functionalist, and eventually behaviorist approaches, Calkins developed an alternative she called self-psychology: the idea that the experiencing self, not isolated sensations or observable behavior, should be the actual subject matter of psychology.
That position increasingly put her at odds with the behaviorism coming to dominate American psychology. As behaviorism gained influence after John Watson published his 1913 manifesto arguing that introspection had no place in a scientific psychology, Calkins continued to argue that a scientific psychology could not dispense with consciousness and the experiencing of self. In a 1921 paper, she proposed what she called a “truly psychological behaviorism,” attempting to incorporate the study of behavior without eliminating conscious experience.
“Like all introspectionists, I welcome cordially every positive contribution of behaviorism—every study of conditioned reflex and bodily response. For it is an admitted part of the psychologist’s business to correlate bodily reactions with conscious experiences—immediate reactions, for example, with perceiving, delayed reactions with deliberation, chaotic and interrupted reactions with emotion.”
Mary Whiton Calkins, in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol 1
Calkins’s emphasis on the unified, experiencing person bears a conceptual resemblance to the humanistic psychology that emerged decades later, although a direct line of influence on figures such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow is difficult to establish.
Recognition Without the Degree
What Harvard withheld, others in her profession did not. In 1905, Calkins was elected president of the American Psychological Association, and in 1918, president of the American Philosophical Association as well. She was the first woman to lead either association—and ultimately the first woman to lead both.
Columbia and Smith each awarded her honorary doctorates—Columbia, a Doctor of Letters in 1909, and Smith a Doctor of Laws in 1910—and before retiring from Wellesley in 1929, she had published four books and more than one hundred papers.
But her supporters hadn’t given up on her Harvard degree. In 1927, a group of thirteen prominent Harvard alumni—among them psychologists Robert Yerkes, Edward Thorndike, and Robert Woodworth—petitioned Harvard directly to award Calkins the PhD she’d earned more than three decades earlier. Harvard refused again, on the grounds that there was no compelling reason to reverse the decision. Calkins died in 1930 with her degree still unresolved. At the time of this writing, the university has never granted the degree, posthumously or otherwise, despite a 2002 campaign launched by students at Kalamazoo College and multiple later petitions, including one by APA’s Psychology of Women Division in 2005.
It’s an unusual legacy: Calkins is remembered today largely for a credential she never received. But she established an enduring research method, developed a theory of the self that anticipated certain themes of later humanistic psychology, and was elected to lead two national scholarly societies. The latter accomplishment speaks volumes about how highly she was regarded by her professional peers. This admirable body of work would have been more than enough to define a career on its own. Calkins herself seemed to understand that the missing degree said more about the institution withholding it than about her. She built the career anyway.
What Was Self-Psychology, Exactly?
As early-twentieth-century psychology divided among structuralist, functionalist, and eventually behaviorist approaches, Calkins developed an alternative she called self-psychology. She didn’t invent the term “self” as used in psychology, but she became one of the most prominent psychologists to insist that the self belonged at the center of the discipline rather than at its edges—a position that put her in direct opposition to some of the influential movements of her era.
One was structuralism, associated with Edward Titchener, which treated the mind as something to be broken into its component sensations, images, and feelings through careful introspective analysis, much the way a chemist might isolate the elements of a compound. Calkins didn’t reject introspection—she used it constantly—but she objected to structuralism’s habit of studying “experience” while leaving out the person doing the experiencing. To describe a sensation of redness or a feeling of sadness without reference to the “self” who was having that sensation or feeling struck her as an artificial and ultimately misleading abstraction.
By self, or I, is meant what every one of us means by such expressions as ‘I am ashamed of myself,’ ‘I approve of myself,’ ‘I appeal to you, yourself.’
Mary Whiton Calkins, in A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol 1
Another was the behaviorism that would soon eclipse structuralism entirely, led by John Watson, which went a step further and argued that consciousness—self included—wasn’t a legitimate object of scientific study at all. Only observable behavior could be measured, and only measurable things belonged in a science. Calkins found this just as unsatisfying, though for the opposite reason: its mistake wasn’t in stopping short of the self; it disposed of it altogether.
In a 1921 paper, she proposed what she called “a truly psychological behaviorism,” attempting to incorporate the study of behavior without eliminating conscious experience. More broadly, her self-psychology treated the self as a conscious, unified being that perceives, feels, and acts. Although the self could not be reduced to component sensations or fully defined, Calkins believed it could be directly experienced and described through introspection. The essence of her argument was that sensations and behaviors don’t occur in a vacuum. There is always someone doing the sensing, feeling, or acting, and Calkins thought a psychology that couldn’t account for that “someone” was leaving out the very thing it was supposed to explain.
Behaviorism dominated American psychology for the next several decades. In retrospect, however, Calkins’s emphasis on the unified, experiencing person bears a conceptual resemblance to the later approaches of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. Her approach also had affinities with that of her contemporary, Alfred Adler, whose “Individual Psychology” considered the person in holistic terms, and emphasized the purposes, beliefs, and social context that shaped behavior. The cognitive revolution eventually restored mental processes to scientific respectability, but Calkins didn’t win the argument in her own lifetime. She simply recognized a question the field would eventually have to acknowledge and answer.
Key References
American Psychological Association, “Mary Whiton Calkins: 1905 APA President.”
Laurel Furumoto, “Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930),” Psychology of Women Quarterly (1980).
Mary Whiton Calkins, autobiographical essay in Carl Murchison, ed., A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol. 1 (1930).
UBC Department of Psychology, “History in the Making: UBC Psychology Students Aim to Right a Wrong” (2021).
