Challenging the Narrative of “Founding Fathers”

Picture this scene from 1895. A young woman sits before a panel of Harvard’s most distinguished psychology professors—William James, Hugo Münsterberg, Josiah Royce. She has just defended her ground-breaking research on memory and self-psychology. The committee is unanimous: her work merits a doctorate.

William James himself declares it

the most brilliant examination for the PhD that we have had at Harvard.

But here’s what happened next: Harvard’s administration refused to grant Mary Whiton Calkins her degree. Not because her research was inadequate. Not because she failed any requirement. But because, in their words,

Harvard does not accept women.

Here’s the part that is astonishing: in 2002 (more than a century later) when psychology students petitioned Harvard to posthumously award Calkins her PhD, the university still refused (Boatwright et al., 2016).

This story embodies a profound and disturbing question: Whose voices have we systematically excluded from psychology’s history, and what has this exclusion cost our understanding of human experience?

• Margaret Floy Washburn (1894): First woman PhD in psychology
• Karen Horney (1920s): Challenged Freudian p*nis envy—created feminist psychology
• Mamie Phipps Clark (1940s): Doll studies dismantled segregation
• Anna Freud: Defense mechanisms still used today

Let’s learn about the women who built the foundations of modern psychology—often against impossible odds. Margaret Floy Washburn earned the first psychology doctorate awarded to a woman in 1894. But here’s what textbooks don’t tell us: Columbia University initially refused to let her audit classes. She had to convince James McKeen Cattell through sheer persistence. Her book ‘The Animal Mind’ was the most widely used comparative psychology text for decades, yet she’s rarely mentioned alongside male contemporaries (Washburn, 1908).

Karen Horney didn’t just critique Freud—she revolutionized how we understand gender and psychology. When Freud claimed women suffered from ‘penis envy,’ Horney fired back with ‘womb envy’—arguing that men’s drive for achievement stems from their inability to create life. She wrote:

The boys have had to construct… a grandiose superstructure to compensate for this fundamental weakness’ (Horney, 1926).

Think about that for a moment. While Freud was pathologizing women for supposedly envying male anatomy, Horney was pointing out that perhaps men envied women’s creative capacity. She founded feminist psychology in the 1920s—yet many textbooks still call Freud the ‘father of psychoanalysis’ without mentioning the woman who fundamentally challenged his core assumptions (Paris, 1994).

Mamie Phipps Clark became the first Black woman to earn a psychology PhD from Columbia in 1943. Her doll studies—showing how segregation damaged Black children’s self-esteem—became crucial evidence in Brown v. Board of Education. She didn’t just conduct research; she used psychology to dismantle institutional racism. Yet Kenneth Clark, her husband and research partner, often gets sole credit for their collaborative work (Howard University, 2022).

But here’s what we need to understand: these weren’t isolated cases of individual discrimination. This was systematic exclusion operating at every level of academia. Universities explicitly banned women. Professional societies excluded them from leadership. Publishers refused their manuscripts. And when women did breakthrough, their contributions were minimized, misattributed, or simply forgotten. Janis Bohan’s research documents what she calls the ‘classic history’ problem: women psychologists’ contributions and lives were systematically ‘excluded or minimized in traditional accounts of the field for many, many years’ (Thomas, 1985).

This isn’t ancient history. A 2021 study found that even today, women are significantly underrepresented as authors and editors in psychology journals, even on topics specifically related to gender (Llorens et al., 2021). Female psychology students still report that their textbooks focus overwhelmingly on male ‘founding fathers’ while women appear as footnotes, if at all (Shields, 2014).

Take a minute to think: If women pioneers like Calkins, Horney, Washburn, and Clark had been equally recognized and celebrated, how might our current models of therapy and psychological understanding look different today?

What is striking about these women pioneers is that they didn’t just contribute to psychology—they challenged psychology to be more inclusive, more critical, more socially conscious. Horney questioned whether supposedly universal theories were actually just male perspectives. Clark used psychology to fight systemic racism. Calkins insisted that the self couldn’t be understood in isolation from relationships and community. These weren’t just methodological contributions—they were epistemological challenges to how we create psychological knowledge.

And here’s the crucial point: when we erase women’s contributions from psychology’s history, we don’t just lose individual stories. We lose entire ways of understanding human experience. We lose critiques of power, analyses of gender, attention to social justice, emphasis on relationships and context. Contemporary mental health professionals inherit both the gifts and the limitations of psychology’s history. The question is: Will they reproduce the patterns of exclusion that marginalized these pioneers, or will they actively work to amplify voices that have been systematically silenced?

Sources

1. Boatwright, K. J., Lopez, A., & Glassburey, A. (2016). Justice for Mary Whiton Calkins. Digital archive project, Kalamazoo College.
2. Brown, L. S., & Ballou, M. (Eds.). (2002). Rethinking mental health and disorder: Feminist perspectives. Guilford Press.
3. Clark, M. P., & Clark, K. B. (1947). Racial identification and preference in Negro children. In T. M. Newcomb & E. L. Hartley (Eds.), Readings in social psychology (pp. 169-178). Henry Holt.
4. Denmark, F. L., & Fernandez, L. C. (1993). Historical development of the psychology of women. In F. L. Denmark & M. A. Paludi (Eds.), A handbook for the psychology of women (pp. 3-22). Greenwood Press.
5. Howard University. (2022, March 9). Mamie Phipps Clark: The pioneering psychologist behind famed ‘dolls test’. The Dig. https://thedig.howard.edu/all-stories/mamie-phipps-clark-pioneering-psychologist-behind-famed-dolls-test
6. Horney, K. (1926). The flight from womanhood: The masculinity complex in women as viewed by men and by women. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 7, 324-339.
7. Llorens, A., Tzovara, A., Bellier, L., Bhaya-Grossman, I., Bidet-Caulet, A., Chang, W. K., … & Daume, J. (2021). Gender bias in academia: A lifetime problem that needs solutions. Neuron, 109(13), 2047-2074. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.06.002
8. Paris, B. J. (1994). Karen Horney: A psychoanalyst’s search for self-understanding. Yale University Press.
9. Scarborough, E., & Furumoto, L. (1987). Untold lives: The first generation of American women psychologists. Columbia University Press.
10. Shields, S. A. (2014). The new psychology of women: A feminist analysis. In F. L. Denmark & M. A. Paludi (Eds.), Psychology of women: A handbook of issues and theories (2nd ed., pp. 1-20). Praeger Publishers.
11. Thomas, L. E. (1985). A brief history of the Association for Women in Psychology: 1969-1985. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 9(4), 431-446. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6402.1985.tb00896.x
12. Washburn, M. F. (1908). The animal mind: A text-book of comparative psychology. Macmillan.