1874-1947
Early Life
Helen Bradford Thompson
Woolley was born to David Wallace Thompson and Isabella Perkins Thompson on
November 6, 1874 in Chicago, Illinois. Her father was shoe maker and her mother
a homemaker and both were very supportive of her academic interests and made
sure all three of their daughters attended college.
In 1893, Thompson
graduated from Englewood High School first in her class; she was awarded a
scholarship to the University of Chicago. Thompson was an exemplary student and
in 1897 she received her undergraduate degree and continued working toward a
graduate degree focused on neurology and philosophy. She was offered a graduate
fellowship in psychology and began studying under James J. Angell. Thompson
graduated with a PhD summa cum laude in
1900 at the University of Chicago and received a postgraduate fellowship from
the Association of Collegiate Alumnae to study in Paris and Berlin for a year.
While studying at the University of Chicago, Thompson became engaged to Paul
Woolley, a medical student.
Professional Life
After studying in Paris
and Berlin, Thompson returned to the United States to teach at Mount Holycke
College in Massachusetts. In 1902, she became the school’s psychological
laboratory director and psychology professor. Three years later, Thompson
resigned and traveled to Japan to marry her fiancé and then the couple moved to
the Phillipines where Thompson’s husband worked as the director of the Serum Laboratory
in Manila. During her time there, she worked for the Phillipines Bureau of
Education as an experimental psychologist. Thompson then followed her husband
to Bangkok because of his job and in 1907 she became the Chief Inspector of
Health. In 1908, Thompson returned to the United States as a result of the
birth of her first baby and then the family settled in Cincinnati. Thompson
worked at the University of Cincinnati teaching philosophy from 1909 to 1911.
From 1911 to 1921, Thompson served as director of the Bureau for the
Investigation of Working Children in Ohio and chair of the Ohio Woman Suffrage
Association. At the Bureau, Thompson investigated the effects of child labor
and she found out the importance of education in raising a child’s IQ. Her report,
An Experimental Study of Children at Work and in School Between the Ages of
Fourteen and Eighteen, was published in 1926 and her finding made remarkable
contributions in the area of child development.
In 1921, Thompson
followed her husband to Detroit, who had moved a year earlier after being
assigned a job there. In Detroit, Thompson served as the Associate Director of
the Merrill-Palmer School and it was there that she started a nursery school
with the purpose of researching the development of children and the training of
teachers. Based on this research, she published “Personality Studies of Three
Year Olds” in the Journal of Experimental
Psychology in 1922; three case studies of children in the nursery school,
“Agnes: A dominant Personality in the Making,” “Peter: the Beginnings of a
Juvenile Court Problem” and “David: A Study of the Experience of a Nursery
School in Training a Child Adopted from an Institution.”
In 1923, Paul Woolley
left to California to receive treatment for tuberculosis while Thompson stayed
behind with their two daughters. She then accepted a position as Director of
the Institute of Child Welfare Research in New York and as professor at
Teachers College. Thompson began having health problems during this time as a
result of commuting from Detroit to New York every two weeks of the spring
semester in 1926. During this time she also had a hysterectomy and an
appendectomy because of a tumor, her husband filed for divorce, and her best
friend died of cancer. All these events led her to become emotionally ill and made
her spend a year recovering in a sanatorium. Thompson returned to teach at
Teachers College, but struggled with her duties. In 1930, the college asked her
to resign and after this she was never again able to get a job. Thompson became
financially dependent on her daughter and son-in-law as a result of being
unemployed and moved to Pennsylvania to live with her daughter. Thompson died
of cardiovascular disease on December 24, 1947 at the age of 73.
Relevance
Helen Thompson Woolley was the first person to
systematically and experimentally investigate gender differences and challenge
the popular belief of female inferiority. She compared the performance of 25
men and 25 women on various sensory, motor and intellectual tasks. Her study
was done under strict research methodology and “avoided using averages that
distort distribution of data.” Although Thompson did find differences between
men and women, she was able to demonstrate how environmental factors could
account for them and found no empirical evidence of female inferiority.
Thompson was also the first to observe a “sex difference on measures of
visual-spatial stimuli response.” Her doctoral dissertation, Psychological Norms in Men and Women,
was eventually published, “The Mental Traits of Sex” in 1903 and although she received
mixed reviews, her research helped debilitate the popular term of “biological
determinism”
Although at the time
Thompson was one of the few women who could attend college, she still faced the
same challenges of women in her time and this led her to become involved in
social reform and become a woman’s rights activist. She used the power she had
in academia to empower women by becoming a member of the Ohio Woman Suffrage
Association and at one point even the chairperson. Even after having a second
child and a husband who was never really there,she was still able to contribute in the field of psychology.
Works Cited
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/02/sentimental.aspx
http://web.sau.edu/WaterStreetMaryA/helen_woolley.htm
http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/wooley.html
http://www.feministvoices.com/helen-thompson-woolley/
