Updated on 1/28/21

This day marks a welcomed opportunity to highlight female contributions across every culture, industry, and profession. This includes the field of psychology, where women have historically encountered similar discrimination and inequality felt in other industries.

Early Influences

The names Freud, Skinner, and Jung often top the list of most prominent early psychologists. You may assume women weren’t on the forefront of this emerging specialty, yet women have actually contributed to psychologysince its inception. In the early 1900s, about one out of every 10 psychologists in the United States was female.

This small group of pioneers faced adversity like women in other industries. Many were blocked from studying alongside men. Others were denied degrees they’d earned or faced challenges in finding positions where they could research and publish.

Ann Johnson, a professor of psychology at the University of St. Thomas, spoke about the eventual shift in female acceptance at a“History of Women in Psychology”symposium.

“Women psychologists’ contributions and lives were excluded or minimized in traditional accounts of the field for many, many years, but that began to change, finally, after the infusion of feminist critique and analysis into psychology in the 60s and 70s, when their contributions and their lives were resurrected and historians started to document the life stories of these women and to preserve their voices,” she said.

Female Pioneers

So, who were these brave women who aspired to use their knowledge and expertise to help form the foundation of psychology that we know today? Here are just a few of these inspirational women.

Anna Freud

Mary Whiton Calkins

As the American Psychological Association’s (APA) first female president,Mary Whiton Calkinsis a noteworthy early psychologist. She’s remembered for her writings that combine philosophy and psychology. Her work centered on memory and the self, which she said could never be fully defined.

She earned her PhDat Harvard but was refused the degree (even posthumously) on the grounds that Harvard didn’t accept women.

Whiton Calkins established one of the first psychological laboratories in the country at Wellesley College where she taught until she died in 1929.

Mary Ainsworth

As a developmental psychologist,Ainsworthwas a lead researcher in the field of attachment theory. She developed the Strange Situation Test, which analyzes the pattern of attachment between a child and mother or caregiver. Still used in psychiatry andpsychologytoday, the test identified four areas ofattachment: secure, anxious-resistant insecure, anxious-avoidant insecure, and disorganized/disoriented.

Results demonstrated that for young children, the primary caregiver is responsible for creating a secure foundation to explore the world. Later research built on the Canadian’s findings and found a strong correlation between achild’s attachment styleand mental health challenges.

Karen Horney

This German psychoanalyst born in the late 1800s foundedfeminist psychology, the study of how gender power imbalances impact the development of psychological theories and mental health treatment. She urged others in the field to recognize how differences between men and women originate in socialization and culture — not biology.

Horney was forced to resign from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1941, but later co-founded the Association of the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and theAmerican Institute for Psychoanalysis. She focused her research on how culture shapes personality.

Feminist Therapy

These female researchers shaped various aspects of psychology and were directly involved in creating new treatments and approaches in the process, including feminist therapy.

“In the aftermath of the civil rights and women’s movements, the profession began to become more diverse, said Rachel O’Neill, Ph.D., LPCC-S, a Talkspace therapist. “And as more women began to enter the profession, their voices helped to shape the narrative related to the mental health needs of women.”

Feminist therapystarted as a way for women to help women, but it has evolved to include anyone who wants to explore the role of gender in their emotions or relationships. Participants work to explore their identity, find their strengths, and use them to feel more powerful. Many use role-playing and assertiveness training to build their identity andself-esteem— all in an effort to combat cultural expectations and the restrictive limitations of gender roles. Unlike other forms of psychotherapy, therapists using this method may share their own personal stories.

Countless other approaches and disciplines are attributed to female psychologists. O’Neill points to Marsha Linehan, the creator of thedialectical behavior therapy(DBT) approach, as especially influential.

Looking Ahead

As we celebrate International Women’s Day 2020, we honorhow far the field has come. Nearly two-thirds of psychology graduate students and more than half of the APA are women. Almost 75 percent of psychology majors are female. Yet areport from the APAshows that female psychologists still lag behind men in terms of money, power, and status.

As more women enter the field, we hope to see greater gains — equality for all. That’s truly#EachforEqual.

Our goal at Talkspace is to provide the most up-to-date, valuable, and objective information on mental health-related topics in order to help readers make informed decisions.

Articles contain trusted third-party sources that are either directly linked to in the text or listed at the bottom to take readers directly to the source.

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