Classics in the History of Psychology
An internet resource developed by
Christopher D. Green
ISSN 1492-3713
(Return to index)
By Edwin G. Boring (1951)
First published in American Psychologist, 6, 679-682.
Posted
March 2003
Dr. Mildred B.
Mitchell (9) has pointed out that women do not hold administrative and honorific
positions in the APA "in proportion to
their numbers and qualifications" and that especially do they fail
of election to "top-level" offices, being frequently chosen for the
more laborious job of secretary.
Dr. Mitchell is
right, of course. Women are accorded less recognition than men in the professions
and in public life. We hardly need more
statistics to prove that. The APA has had only two women presidents out
of its 59, one in 1905, one in 1921, and none in the last half of its existence
when its increasing size makes election so much more difficult. Only about 8
per cent of the persons listed in American Men of Science (1933 edition)
were women. Less than 6 per cent of the 127 psychologists starred in the first
seven editions of this directory were women.
The National Academy of Sciences (1950) has among its 461 members only three
women. The American Philosophical Society (1950), not limited to science, has
among its 486 members only 8 women. Neither of these societies has any women
among its honorary foreign members. Less
than 8 per cent of the entries in Who's Who in
Certainly the Woman
Problem is not solely a problem for and about women. It will be comprehended
best when it is considered in
relation with similar problems of social dynamics.
The Woman Problem is,
for instance, related to the Great Man problem. Do science and thought and history, we may
ask, advance step-wise by the successive contributions of great men, or is
intellectual progress more or less continuous? Does history perhaps merely
select the names of certain men as indices of advances in thought and knowledge,
while neglecting the antecedent, the contemporaneous and the subsequent events
that are necessary for getting a great discovery ready to be made and then
afterward getting it accepted as truth?
The Great Men of history are the men who achieved great prestige, some
of them while living, others posthumously.
It appears, moreover, that prestige is gained or lost, not only by achievement,
but also by such other reinforcers and inhibitors as the timing of the
discovery, the inertia of contemporaneous thought, the way in which the
discovery is promoted or advertised, and the prestige of the discoverer--for
prestige begets prestige; it has positive feed-back. When a man has first emerged from
inconspicuousness, his subsequent acts gain attention more readily than before
and his prestige tends to build itself up, especially if it is continuously
supported by good work. The point here is that prestige is no simple function
of merit. Neither men nor women gain prestige
simply "in proportion to their qualifications" (in Dr. Mitchell's
phrase). Thus it comes about that an understanding
of the psychodynamics of the history of science will help in an understanding
of the woman problem, for it is not only women who complain of history's
injustice (1).
The Woman Problem is
also similar to the youth problem. On the average, men make their greatest
contributions to knowledge at the ages of 30-45, becoming less effective, less frequently productive,
as they grow older. Harvey Lehman (5, 6,
7, 8, etc.) has plotted these productivity curves. The cause of decreasing
frequency of original contributions by aging men is not yet known; perhaps it
is wholly motivational. In general,
prestige and the culture tend to preserve the status of once important men as
they grow older and in the American success-culture men often maintain prestige
by slipping over into administration from the field of discovery. To some extent the past status of the old is
supported by our culture, but that is not nearly so true here in the occident
as it has been in the orient. As a rule
the young men in their [p. 680] thirties and forties are ready to take over from
the oldsters, and to a considerable
extent they do. Someone once proposed establishing a "Society of
ExperimentING Psychologists" for men under forty, an active group free of
the prestige inhibitions which were-supposed to limit election to the Society
of Experimental Psychologists -- and indeed the new society was formed although
under a different name. Now the grim
reaper of middle age harvests the members of the younger society into the older
-- at age 40 or even sooner. We must not,
however, forget the existence of this Youth Protest, comparable to the Woman
Protest in being directed against the fixed prestige of older men. The chief
difference here is that the young grow old, and change their views, whereas
women never quite turn into men.
For men there is a
standard operating procedure about the acquisition of prestige. In runs--for
psychologists-something like this. First
you get a PhD. Then you manage some good research and publish it. In that way, you get some recognition. You
keep on with research, now accepting also some administrative
responsibilities. If you continue to
impress your profession with the quality of your performance, you are likely to
develop intellectual claustrophobia. You
find yourself presently seeking larger perspectives. Perhaps you write a book, a book that,
bringing together the researches of others, affords you the needed scope for
broad interpretation. Or you may get
over into the administration of research or of other professional
activities. You may even find psychology
too confining and become a dean or a college president. All this is standard for psychologists. It applies approximately to every past
president of the APA. I am not sure that
it holds for theoretical physicists who seem to be able to find scope for broad
interpretation within their science and thus may not need to escape from
reseach[sic] to book-writing or
administration. Nor am I sure that the rule applies to European scientists, for
abroad custom supports the prestige of the older men in greater security than
is the case in
It seems probable
that this standard course or the evaluation of prestige is connected with the normal
American success-culture. Prestige
springs from power and leads to more power, but not much power is required for
dealing with little things. It is the
book-writer and the administrator who handle the large theories and the broad policies,
thus maintaining and enhancing their prestige as they gather in the fruits of
success. It is my impression that it is
at this upper level that women are most often blocked in the pursuit of prestige. If a woman wants power and prestige as an
administrator, she runs up against the man-made world. It is not the APA which
keeps women down, but the universities, industry, the government, the armed
services. With top-level administrative jobs so hard for her
to get, why then does she not write books?
Sometimes she does, but the book that brings prestige should deal with
broad generalities, and there is some indication that the women of our culture
are more interested in the particular, and especially, if I may lift terms from
Terman and Miles (10, 400f.), in the young, helpless and distressed. Rogers, the only clinical psychologist who
until now had been president of the APA, came to fame through a general theory
of therapy and a book about it. Scott, in applied psychology, came in through
administrative success with personnel testing in the First World War. The exceptionally skilful practitioner -- be
he or she clinical psychologist, college teacher, or general physician -- gains
at most a local recognition which almost never admits him to the dictionaries
of biography.
Another important
contributor to prestige is job-concentration.
Beardsley Ruml has spoken humorously of the 168-hour week for the
fanatic who lives primarily for his job -- he who eats, sleeps, and finds
recreation only because he wishes to work better. These compulsive persons are
very common among successful professional men and in business and
statecraft. Such persons can undertake any, job at any time in any place on
earth, provided only it seems important enough. Now it has been remarked that
these people make poor parents, and presumably they usually do. Thus it comes about
that the Woman Problem is found to be affected by philosophy of living. Inevitably there is conflict between
professional success and success as a family man or a family woman. That is not [p. 681] to say, of course, that
a man of exceptional ability can not save time from his profession to spend on his
family, nor that maximal concentration is always maximally efficient in
producing prestige; nevertheless the fact remains that you can not often do two
things at once and that limited time is one of the factors that prevent
achievement. Thus it is true that
ambitious professional mothers have a grievance, for custom gives them greater
responsibility for the children than it gives their husbands. It would have
been desirable for Dr. Mitchell, had it but been possible, to separate in her
statistics the married from the unmarried women, discarding the negligible unmarried
men altogether. It would have been still better for her to have ignored sex and
marital status, and to have used as a basic parameter measures of
job-concentration for every member of the APA. What we are after is knowledge
of the effects of professional fanaticism.
Now against this
background of social dynamics, let us see what must usually happen to the ambitious
woman member of the APA.
I do not believe
that sex prejudice operates against women in APA elections to top-level
offices. I can not prove this faith, but I think that on the average and given
everything else equal, a male psychologist will vote for a woman in preference to
a man -- or for a member of any minority group that he thinks is
underprivileged or discriminated against.
Everything else is, however, not often equal and women are usually not
preferred for the top-level jobs because some of their male competitors have
more prestige.
Intelligence and
special abilities will count for their possessor, man or woman, all
through. Let that not be forgotten. It is only when a woman loses out in
competition to a man of presumably equal intelligence and special skill that the Woman Problem
emerges.
When the
professional woman starts out on her career, she can be imagined as having two
choices to make -- although in fact it is doubtful that she really can do very
much to choose her personality. She can not, of course, choose her level of
intelligence, but she might perhaps attempt a decision about job-concentration
and whether to work with particulars or generalities, in technology or in science. If she chooses less job-concentration in order
to be a broader person, a better wife or a better mother, then she is perhaps
choosing wisely but she is not choosing the maximal professional success of
which she would be capable. She is in competition with fanatics -- the 168-hour
people -- and she had better accept that bit of realism about job-concentration.
Certainly she is less free than a man to choose work that deals with the large generalizations,
because those jobs are associated with basic research, and the top positions in
the universities are not as freely open to women as to men, whereas basic
research under government auspices has not yet settled down into any permanent
pattern.
All along the
question of marriage interferes with the woman's assured planning. Can a woman become a fanatic in her
profession and still remain marriageable? Yes, she can, for I know some, but I
think a woman must be abnormally bright to combine charm with concentration.
These women make the synthesis by being charmingly enthusiastic. The Woman Problem comes up again after the
professional woman has acquired a husband and a couple of children, with the
culture pressing to give her a heavy responsibility in the home, with her
husband noting, perhaps, that his own success demands his own
job-concentration. A couple can compromise and work out a fairly proportioned scheme
for the good life as they see it, and some do just this. Perhaps two spouses, each on half-concentration,
are better than one on full concentration, but the pair would not be elected
president of the APA. Some women readers will undoubtedly think me callous to
the frustration of others, but I am asking only for realism. Do you work at
your profession 20, 40, or 80 hours a week?
It makes a difference in competition, though it is not the only thing to
make a difference; and the Woman Problem exists because there is this
competition and invidious comparison.
There are about as
many married as unmarried women in the APA (4, 14). Why not let the older unmarried
women give up the thought of marriage and compete on equal footing with the
men! Part of the answer to that question is that they will not be on equal
footing. Nearly all the men are married,
and a married man usually manages to make his marriage contribute to his
success and prestige. Most of the
married women do not receive the same professional support from their husbands
and the unmarried women have no husbands.
The only exception in favor of marriage [p. 682] for professional women
is that those women who look for success in the psychology of interpersonal relations
and not for great prestige often believe that their marriages make better
psychologists of them (4, 15f.). In general, marriage is not an asset for most
professionally ambitious women psychologists.
When the unmarried
woman seeks prestige at the upper levels, she finds that the administrative posts
are not fully open to women. Nevertheless, she is free to seek public success
by working with some kind of large generalities. That approach to prestige
generally means writing a definitive discussion of an important topic in a
book. You would think that ambitious
women would take to book-writing more than they do, although it must be admitted that writing a book is more work than those who
do not write them think. Still this is
the right advice to give the women who seek prestige under our present cultural
limitations. If they do not take the advice, perhaps the reason lies in Terman and Miles'
observation that women are more concerned with the particular than the general.
Here then is the
Woman Problem as I see it. For
the ICWP or anyone else to think that the problem can be advanced toward
solution by proving that professional women undergo more frustration and
disappointment than professional men, and by calling then on the conscience of
the profession to right a wrong, is to fail to see the problem clearly in all'
its psychosocial complexities. The problem
turns on the mechanisms for prestige, and that prestige, which leads to honor
and greatness and often to the large salaries, is not with any regularity proportional to professional
merit or the social value of professional achievement. Nor is there any presumption that the possessor of prestige knows how to lead the good life.
You may have to choose. Success is never whole, and, if you have it for this,
you may have to give it up for
that.
References
1.BORING, E. G.
Great men and scientific progress. Proc. Amer. Philos. Sec., 1950, 94, 339-351.
2.
3.
4.
5. LEHMAN, H.
C. The creative years in science and literature. Sci. Monthly, 1936, 43, 151-162.
6. LEHMAN, H.
C. Optimum ages for eminent leadership. Sci.
Monthly, 1942, 54, 162-175.
7. LEHMAN, H.
C. Man's most creative years: then and now. Science, 1943, 98, 393-399.
8. LEHMAN,
H..C. Man's most creative years: quality
versus quantity of output. Sci.
Monthly, 1944, 59, 384-393.
9. MITCHELL, M.
B. Status of women in the American Psychological
Association. Amer. Psychologist, 1951,
6, 193-201.
10. TERMAN, L.
M., AND MILES, C. C. Set and
personality.
Manuscript received