Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman ever to receive a doctorate in
psychology and the second woman to be elected to the National Academy of
Sciences (1931), the most eminent scientific society in the United States. The
only child of Francis Washburn and Elizabeth Floy Davis, Washburn was raised in
a middle class home in New York. The women in her family were exceptional and
attained high levels of academic accomplishment for the era. Educated both in
public and private schools, Washburn graduated from Vassar College in 1891 with
a keen interest in science and philosophy. She audited graduate courses taught
by James McKeen Cattell at Columbia University, but in spite of his full
support, she was denied admission to the graduate program due to gender
restrictions. Admitted as a degree candidate at Cornell University, she won the
Susan Lynn Sage Fellowship in Philosophy and Ethics. In two short years, working
with the noted researcher Edward B. Titchener (1886-1927) in experimental
psychology, Washburn earned her Ph.D., the first woman ever to receive a
doctorate in psychology. In 1894, she was elected to membership in the American
Psychological Association where she eventually became a council member,
establishing policy and serving on many committees.
Because women were not eligible to be hired as regular faculty in psychology or
philosophy departments in any major Eastern university at the close of the
nineteenth century, Washburn held a series of teaching positions at women's
colleges, including Wells College (1894), Sage College at Cornell University
(1900) and the University of Cincinnati (1902). Although Edward Titchener had
been her mentor at Cornell, he refused to admit her to the Society of
Experimental Psychologists he formed in 1904. While this group was expressly
designed to help young researchers, he summarily excluded all women on the
grounds that their presence would inhibit "frank discussion" among the male
members. In 1903, Washburn became Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vassar
College, where she was promoted to professor in 1908, eventually becoming
professor emeritus in 1937.
Washburn was known primarily for her work in animal psychology. The Animal Mind,
which she published in 1908, was the first book by an American in this field and
remained the standard comparative psychology textbook for the next 25 years.
(Subsequent editions appeared in 1917, 1926, and 1936.) In Movement and Mental
Imagery (1916), she presented her motor theory of consciousness, in which she
attempted to mediate between the structuralist, or "introspective" tradition of
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) and Titchener, in which she had been schooled, and the
opposing behaviorist view. These competing movements had divorced consciousness
from behavior, with the structuralists studying only the former, while the
behaviorists maintained that psychology should only be concerned with the
latter. Washburn's theory reconciled these two perspectives by exploring the
ways in which thoughts and perceptions produce motor reaction.
In 1925, Washburn was named one of four coeditors of the American Journal of
Psychology. She was elected president of the American Psychological Association
in 1921 and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1931, the second
woman ever to be chosen for that honor. Altogether, Washburn published over 200
articles and reviews, including more than 70 research articles during her
33-year tenure at Vassar. In her writings, she developed her theory of
consciousness at greater length and explored such diverse topics as individual
differences, color vision in animals, aesthetic preferences for colors and
sounds, after-images, and psychology of the affective processes.
