For this class discussion, read the attached article by Shields (1975), which was published in American Psychologist, and details the history of early psychologists’ research on gender differences, with all the biases showing. Comment on what you found most important, interesting, or surprising about the article. Check back later to read your classmate’s comments and reply to at least one classmate, responding to his/her comment. Note: To receive full credit for this assignment you must make two submissions: one in response the the original post and one in reply to a classmate’s reply. (This discussion is worth 20 points.)
Functionalism, Darwinism, and the
Psychology of Women
A Study in Social Myth
• STEPHANIE A. SHIELDS Pennsylvania State University
The psychology of women is acquiring the character
of an academic entity as witnessed by the prolifera-
tion of research on sex differences, the appearance
of textbooks devoted to the psychology of women,
and the formation of a separate APA division, Psy-
chology of Women. Nevertheless, there is almost
universal ignorance of the psychology of women
as it existed prior to its incorporation into psycho-
analytic theory. If the maxim “A nation without
a history is like a man without a memory” can be
applied, then it would behoove the amnesiacs in-
terested in female psychology to investigate its
pre-Freudian past.
This article focuses on one period of that past
(from the latter half of the 19th century to the
first third of the 20th) in order to clarify the im-
portant issues of the time and trace their develop-
ment to the position they occupy in current psy-
chological theory. Even a limited overview leads
the reader to appreciate Helen Thompson Woolley’s
(1910) early appraisal of the quality of the re-
search on sex differences:
There is perhaps no field aspiring to be scientific where
flagrant personal bias, logic martyred in the cause of sup-
porting a prejudice, unfounded assertions, and even senti-
mental rot and drivel, have run riot to such an extent as
here. (p. 340)
The Functionalist Milieu
Although the nature of woman had been an aca-
demic and social concern of philosopher psycholo-
gists throughout the ages, formal psychology (its
The author would like to thank Judith Abplanalp,
Carolyn Sherif, and Dale Harris for helpful comments con-
cerning earlier drafts of this manuscript.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Stephanie Shields,
Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, Pennsylvania 16802.
inception usually dated 1879) was relatively slow
to take up the topic of female psychology. The
“woman question” was a social one, and social
problems did not fall within the sharply defined
limits of Wundt’s “new” psychology. The business
of psychology was the description of the “gen-
eralized adult mind,” and it is not at all clear
whether “adult” was meant to include both sexes.
When the students of German psychology did ven-
ture outside of the laboratory, however, there is
no evidence that they were sympathetic to those
defending the equality of male and female ability
(cf.Wundt, 1901).
It was the functionalist movement in the United
States that fostered academic psychology’s study
of sex differences and, by extension, a prototypic
psychology of women. The incorporation of evolu-
tionary theory into the practice of psychology made
the study of the female legitimate, if not impera-
tive. It would be incorrect to assume that the
psychology of women existed as a separate spe-
cialty within the discipline. The female was dis-
cussed only in relation to the male, and the func-
tion of the female was thought to be distinctly
different from and complementary to the function
of the male. The leitmotiv of evolutionary theory
as it came to ‘be applied to the social sciences was
the evolutionary supremacy of the Caucasian male.
The notion of the supplementary, subordinate role
of the female was ancillary to the development of
that theme.
The influence of evolutionary theory on the psy-
chology of women can be traced along two major
conceptual lines: (a) by emphasizing the biological
foundations of temperament, evolutionary theory
led to serious academic discussion of maternal in-
stinct (as one facet of the general topic of in-
stinct); and (b) by providing a theoretical justi-
fication of the study of individual differences,
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 1975 • 739
evolutionary theory opened the door to the study
of sex differences in sensory, motor, and intellectual
abilities. As a whole, the concept of evolution
with its concomitant emphasis on biological de-
terminism provided ample “scientific” reason for
cataloging the “innate” differences in male and
female nature.
This article examines three topics that were of
special significance to the psychology of women
during the functionalist era: (a) structural differ-
ences in the brains of males and females and the
implications of these differences for intelligence
and temperament, (b) the hypothesis of greater
male variability and its relation to social and edu-
cational issues, and (c) maternal instinct and its
meaning for a psychology of female “nature.” As
the functionalist paradigm gave way to behaviorism
and psychoanalytic theory, the definition and
“meaning” of each of these issues changed to fit
the times. When issues faded in importance, it
was not because they were resolved but because
they ceased to serve as viable scientific “myths”
in the changing social and scientific milieu. As
the times change, so must the myths change.
The Female Brain
The topic of female intelligence came to 19th-‘
century psychology via phrenology and the neuro-
anatomists. Philosophers of the time (e.g., Hegel,
Kant, Schopenhauer) had demonstrated, to their
satisfaction, the justice of woman’s subordinate
social position, and it was left to the men of science
to discover the particular physiological determi-
nants of female inadequacy. In earlier periods,
woman’s inferiority had been defined as a general
“state” intimately related to the absence of quali-
ties that would have rendered her a male and to
the presence of reproductive equipment that des-
tined her to be female. For centuries the mode of
Eve’s creation and her greater guilt for the fall
from grace had been credited as the cause of
woman’s imperfect nature, but this was not an
adequate explanation in a scientific age, Thus,
science sought explanations for female inferiority
that were more in keeping with contemporary
scientific philosophy.
Although it had long been believed that the brain
was the chief organ of the mind, the comparison of
male and female mental powers traditionally in-
cluded only allusions to vague “imperfections” of
the female brain. More precise definition of the
sites of these imperfections awaited the advance-
ment of the concept of cortical localization of func-
tion. Then, as finer distinctions of functional
areas were noted, there was a parallel recognition
of the differences between those sites as they ap-
peared in each sex.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the slowly
increasing interest in the cerebral gyri rapidly
gathered momentum with the popularization of
phrenology. Introduced by Franz Joseph Gall,
“cranioscopy,” as he preferred to call it, postulated
that the seat of various mental and moral faculties
was located in specific areas of the brain’s surface
such that a surfeit or deficiency could be detected
by an external examination of the cranium.
Phrenology provided the first objective method for
determining the neurological foundation of sex
differences in intelligence and temperament that
had long been promulgated. Once investigation
of brain structure had begun, it was fully antici-
pated that visible sex differences would be found:
Did not the difference between the sexes pervade
every other aspect of physique and physiological
function? Because physical differences were so
obvious in every other organ of the body, it was
unthinkable that the brain could have escaped the
stamp of sex.
Gall was convinced that he could, from gross
anatomical observation, discriminate between male
and female brains, claiming that “if there had been
presented to him in water, the fresh brains of two
adult animals of any species, one male and the
other female, he could have distinguished the two
sexes” (Walker, 1850, p. 317). Gall’s student and
colleague, Johann Spurzheim, elaborated on this
basic distinction by noting that the frontal lobes
were less developed in females, “the organs of the
perceptive faculties being commonly larger than
those of the reflective powers.” Gall also observed
sex differences in the nervous tissue itself, “con-
firming” Malebranche’s belief that the female
“cerebral fibre” is softer than that of the male,
and that it is also “slender and long rather than
thick” (Walker, 1850, p. 318). Spurzheim also
listed the cerebral “organs” whose appearance dif-
fered commonly in males and females: females
tended to have the areas devoted to philoprogene-
tiveness and other “tender” traits most prominent,
while in males, areas of aggressiveness and con-
structiveness dominated. Even though cranioscopy
did not survive as a valid system of describing
cortical function, the practice of comparing the
740 • JULY 1975 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
appearance of all or part of the brain for anatomi-
cal evidence of quality of function remained one
of the most popular means of providing proof of
female mental inferiority. Most comparisons used
adult human brains, but with the rise of evolu-
tionary theory, increasing emphasis was placed on
the value of developmental and cross-species com-
parisons. The argument for female mental in-
feriority took two forms: some argued that quality
of intellect was proportional to absolute or relative
brain size; others, more in the tradition of cortical
localization, contended that the presence of certain
mental qualities was dependent upon the develop-
ment of corresponding brain centers.
The measurement of cranial capacity had long
been in vogue as one method of determining in-
tellectual ability. That women had smaller heads
than men was taken by some as clear proof of a
real disparity between male and female intelligence.
The consistently smaller brain size of the female
was cited as another anatomical indicator of its
functional inferiority. More brain necessarily
meant better brain; the exception only proved this
rule. Alexander Bain (1875) was among those
who believed that the smaller absolute brain size
of females accounted for a lesser mental ability.
George Romanes (1887) enumerated the “second-
ary sex characteristics” of mental abilities at-
tributable to brain size. The smaller brain of
women was directly responsible for their mental
inferiority, which “displays itself most conspicu-
ously in a comparative absence of originality, and
this more especially in the higher levels of intellec-
tual work” (p. 655). He, like many, allowed that
women were to some degree compensated for in-
tellectual inferiority by a superiority of instinct
and perceptual ability. These advantages carried
with them the germ of female failure, however, by
making women more subject to emotionality.
Proof of the male’s absolute brain-size superi-
ority was not enough to secure his position of in-
tellectual superiority, since greater height and
weight tended to offset the brain-size advantage.
Reams of paper were, therefore, dedicated to the
search for the most “appropriate” relative mea-
sures, but results were equivocal: if the ratio of
brain weight to body weight is considered, it is
found that women possess a proportionately larger
brain than men; if the ratio of brain surface to
body surface is computed, it is found to favor men.
That some of the ratios “favored” males while
others “favored” females led some canny souls to
conclude that there was no legitimate solution to
the problem. That they had ever hoped for a
solution seems remarkable; estimates of brain size
from cranial capacity involve a large margin of
error because brains differing as much as 15%
have been found in heads of the same size (Elliott,
1969, p. 316).
Hughlings Jackson has been credited as the first
to regard the frontal cortex as the repository of
the highest mental capacities, but the notion must
have held popular credence as early as the 18SOs
because that period saw sporadic references to the
comparative development of the frontal lobes in
men and women. Once the function of the frontal
lobes had been established, many researchers re-
ported finding that the male possessed noticeably
larger and more well-developed frontal lobes than
females. The neuroanatomist Hischke came to the
conclusion in 1854 that woman is homo parietalis
while man is homo frontalis (Ellis, 1934). Like-
wise, Rudinger in 1877 found the frontal lobes of
man in every way more extensive than those of
women, and reported that these sex differences
were evident even in the unborn fetus (Mobius,
1901).
At the turn of the century, the parietal lobes
(rather than the frontal lobes) came to be regarded
by some as the seat of intellect, and the necessary
sex difference in parietal development was duly
corroborated by the neuroanatomists. The change
in cerebral hierarchy involved a bit of revisionism:
the frontal region is not, as has been supposed smaller in
woman, but rather larger relatively. . . . But the parietal
lobe is somewhat smaller, [furthermore,] a preponderance
of the frontal region does not imply intellectual superiority
. . . the parietal region is really the more important.
(Patrick, 189S, p. 212)
Once beliefs regarding the relative importance of
the frontal and parietal lobes had shifted, it be-
came critical to reestablish congruence between
neuroanatomical findings and accepted sex differ-
ences. Among those finding parietal predominance
in men were Paul Broca,1 Theodore Meynert, and
the German Rudinger (see Ellis, 1934, p. 217).
1 Ellis (1934) claimed that Broca’s opinion changed over
time. Broca
became inclined to think that it [the hypothesized male
superiority of intellect] was merely a matter of educa-
tion—of muscular . . . not merely mental, education—
and he thought that if left to their spontaneous impulses
men and women would tend to resemble each other, as
happens in the savage condition, (p. 222)
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 1975 • 741
Other neuroanatomical “deficiencies” of the fe-
male were found in (a) the area of the corpus
callosum, (b) the complexity of the gyri and sulci,
(c) the conformation of gyri and sulci, and (d)
the rate of development of the cortex of the fetus
(Woolley, 1910, p. 335). Franklin Mall (1909)
objected to the use of faulty research methods that
gave spurious differences the appearance of being
real. Among the most serious errors he noted was
the practice of making observations with a knowl-
edge of the sex of the brain under consideration.
The debate concerning the importance of brain
size and anatomy as indicators of intelligence di-
minished somewhat with the development of mental
tests; nevertheless, the brain-size difference was
a phenomenon that many felt obligated to inter-
pret. Max Meyer (1921) attempted to settle the
matter by examining the various measures of rela-
tive difference that had been employed. After
finding these methods far too equivocal, he con-
cluded, in the best behavioristic terms, that sex
differences in intelligence were simply “accidents
of habits acquired.”
Characteristics of the female brain were thought
not simply to render women less intelligent but also
to allow more “primitive” parts of human nature
to be expressed in her personality. Instinct was
thought to dominate woman, as did her emotions,
and the resulting “affectability” was considered
woman’s greatest weakness, the reason for her
inevitable failure. Affectability was typically de-
fined as a general state, the manifestation of in-
stinctive and emotional predispositions that in men
were kept in check by a superior intellect.2
One of the most virulent critics of woman was
the German physiologist Paul Mobius (1901), who
argued that her mental incapacity was a necessary
condition for the survival of the race. Instinct
rendered her easily led and easily pleased, so much
2 Burt and Moore (1912, p. 385), inspired by contem-
porary theories of cortical localization of function, proposed
a neurological theory of female affectability. On the basis
of the popular belief that the thalamus was “the centre
for the natural expression of the emotions” while “con-
trol of movements and the association of ideas” was local-
ized in the cortex and the common assumption that the
male was more inclined to be intellectual and rational and
the female more passionate and emotional, they concluded
that in the adult male the cortex would tend to be “more
completely organized,” while in the adult female “the
thalamus tends to appear more completely organized.”
They came to the general conclusion that “the mental life
of man is predominantly cortical; that of woman pre-
dominantly thalamic.”
the better for her to give her all to bearing and
rearing children. The dependence of woman also
extracted a high price from man:
AH progress is due to man. Therefore the woman is like
a dead weight on him, she prevents much restlessness and
meddlesome inquisitiveness, but she also restrains him from
noble actions, for she is unable to distinguish good from
evil. (p. 629)
Mobius observed that woman was essentially un-
able to think independently, had strong inclinations
to be mean and untrustworthy, and spent a
good deal of her time in an emotionally unbalanced
state. From this he was forced to conclude that:
“If woman was not physically and mentally weak,
if she was not as a rule rendered harmless by
circumstances, she would be extremely dangerous”
(Mobius, 1901, p. 630). Diatribes of this nature
were relatively common German importations;
woman’s severest critics in this country seldom
achieved a similar level of acerbity. Mobius and
his ilk (e.g., Weininger, 1906) were highly pub-
licized and widely read in the United States, and
not a little of their vituperation crept into serious
scientific discussions of woman’s nature. For ex-
ample, Porteus and Babcock (1926) resurrected
the brain-size issue, discounting the importance of
size to intelligence and instead associating it with
the “maturing of other powers.” Males, because
of their larger brains would be more highly en-
dowed with these “other powers,” and so more
competent and achieving. Proposals such as these,
which were less obviously biased than those of
Mobius, Weininger, and others, fit more easily
into the current social value system and so were
more easily assimilated as “good science” (cf.
Allen, 1927, p. 294).
The Variability Hypothesis
The first systematic treatment of individual differ-
ences in intelligence appeared in 1575. Juan
Huarte attributed sex differences in intelligence to
the different humoral qualities that characterized
each sex, a notion that had been popular in
Western thought since ancient Greece. Heat and
dryness were characteristic of the male principle,
while moisture and coolness were female attributes.
Because dryness of spirit was necessary for intelli-
gence, males naturally possessed greater “wit.”
The maintenance of dryness and heat was the
function of the testicles, and Huarte (1959) noted
that if a man were castrated the effects were the
same “as if he had received some notable dammage
742 • JULY 1975 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
in his very braine” (p. 279). Because the princi-
ples necessary for cleverness were only possessed
by males, it behooved parents to conduct their
life-style, diet, and sexual intercourse in such a
manner as to insure the conception of a male. The
humoral theory of sex differences was widely ac-
cepted through the 17th century, but with the
advent of more sophisticated notions of anatomy
and physiology, it was replaced by other, more
specific, theories of female mental defect: the lesser
size and hypothesized simpleness of the female
brain, affectability as the source of inferiority, and
complementarity of abilities in male and female.
It was the developing evolutionary theory that
provided an overall explanation for why these sex
differences existed and why they were necessary
for the survival of the race.
The theory of evolution as proposed by Darwin
had little to say regarding the intellectual capacity
of either sex. It was in Francis Gal ton’s (Charles
Darwin’s cousin) anthropometric laboratory that
the investigation of intellectual differences took an
empirical form (Galton, 1907). The major con-
clusion to come from Gal ton’s research was that
women tend in all their capacities to be inferior
to men. He looked to common experience for
confirmation, reasoning that:
If the sensitivity of women were superior to that of men,
the self interest of merchants would lead to their being
always employed; but as the reverse is the case, the op-
posite supposition is likely to be the true one. (pp. 20-21)
This form of logic—women have not excelled,
therefore they cannot excel—was often used to
support arguments denigrating female intellectual
ability. The fact of the comparative rarity of fe-
male social achievement was also used as “evi-
dence” in what was later to become a widely de-
bated issue concerning the range of female ability.
Prior to the formulation of evolutionary theory,
there had been little concern with* whether devia-
tion from the average or “normal” occurred more
frequently in either sex. One of the first serious
discussions of the topic appeared in the early 19th
century when the anatomist Meckel concluded on
pathological grounds that the human female showed
greater variability than the human male. He
reasoned that because man is the superior animal
and variability a sign of inferiority, this conclusion
was justified (in Ellis, 1903, p. 237). The matter
was left at that until 1871. At that time Darwin
took up the question of variability in The Descent
of Man while attempting to explain how it could
be that in many species males had developed
greatly modified secondary sexual characteristics
while females of the same species had not. He
determined that this was originally caused by the
males’ greater activity and “stronger passions” that
were in turn more likely (he believed) to be trans-
mitted to male offspring. Because the females
would prefer to mate with the strong and pas-
sionate, sexual selection would insure the survival
of those traits. A tendency toward greater varia-
tion per se was not thought to be responsible for
the appearance of unusual characteristics, but “de-
velopment of such characters would be much aided,
if the males were more liable to vary than the fe-
males” (Darwin, 1922, p. 344). To support this
hypothesis of greater male variability, he cited
recent data obtained by anatomists and biologists
that seemed to confirm the relatively more frequent
occurrence of physical anomaly among males.
Because variation from the norm was already
accepted as the mechanism of evolutionary progress
(survival and transmission of adaptive variations)
and because it seemed that the male was the more
variable sex, it soon was universally concluded that
the male is the progressive element in the species.
Variation for its own sake took on a positive value
because greatness, whether of an individual or a
society, could not be achieved without variation.
Once deviation from the norm became legitimized
by evolutionary theory, the hypothesis of greater
male variability became a convenient explanation
for a number of observed sex differences, among
them the greater frequency with which men
achieved “eminence.” By the 1890s it was popu-
larly believed that greater male variability was a
principle that held true, not only for physical
traits but for mental abilities as well:
That men should have greater cerebral variability and
therefore more originality, while women have greater
stability and therefore more “common sense,” are facts
both consistent with the general theory of sex and verifiable
in common experience. (Geddes & Thomson, 1890, p. 271)
Havelock Ellis (1894), an influential sexologist
and social philosopher, brought the variability hy-
pothesis to the attention of psychologists in the
first edition of Man and Woman. After examining
anatomical and pathological data that indicated a
greater male variational tendency (Ellis felt this
term was less ambiguous than variability), he ex-
amined the evidence germane to a discussion of
range of intellectual ability. After noting that
there were more men than women in homes for the
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 1975 • 743
mentally deficient, which indicated a higher inci-
dence of retardation among males, and that there
were more men than women on the roles of the
eminent, which indicated a higher incidence of
genius among males, he concluded that greater
male variability probably held for all qualities of
character and ability. Ellis (1903) particularly
emphasized the wide social and educational sig-
nificance of the phenomenon, claiming that greater
male variability was “a fact which has affected the
whole of our human civilization” (p. 238), par-
ticularly through the production of men of genius.
Ellis (1934) was also adamant that the female’s
tendency toward the average did not necessarily
imply inferiority of talent; rather, it simply limited
her expertise to “the sphere of concrete practical
life” (p. 436).
The variability hypothesis was almost immedi-
ately challenged as a “pseudo-scientific supersti-
tion” by the statistician Karl Pearson (1897).
Though not a feminist, Pearson firmly believed that
the “woman question” deserved impartial, scien-
tific study. He challenged the idea of greater male
variability primarily because he thought it con-
trary to the fact and theory of evolution and
natural selection. According to evolutionary
theory (Pearson, 1897), “the more intense the
struggle the less is the variability, the more nearly
are individuals forced to approach the type fittest
to their surroundings, if they are to survive” (p.
258). In a “civilized” community one would ex-
pect that because men have a “harder battle for
life,” any difference in variation should favor
women. He took Ellis to task by arguing it was
(a) meaningless to consider secondary sex char-
acteristics (as Ellis had done) and, likewise, (b)
foolish to contrast the sexes on the basis of ab-
normalities (as Ellis had done). By redefining the
problem and the means for its solution, he was able
to dismiss the entire corpus of data that had been
amassed: “the whole trend of investigations con-
cerning the relative variability of men and women
up to the present seems to be erroneous” (Pearson,
1897, p. 261). Confining his measurements to
“normal variations in organs or characteristics not
of a secondary sexual character,” he assembled
anthropometric data on various races, from Neo-
lithic skeletons to modern French peasants. He
also challenged the adequacy of statistical com-
parison of only the extremes of the distribution,
preferring to base his contrasts on the dispersion
of measures around the mean. Finding a slight
tendency toward greater female variability, he con-
cluded that the variability hypothesis as stated
remained a “quite unproven principle.”
Ellis countered Pearson in a lengthy article, one
more vicious than that ordinarily due an intellec-
tual affront.3 Pearson’s greatest sins (according
to Ellis) were his failure to define “variability”
and his measurement of characteristics that were
highly subject to environmental influence. Ellis,
of course, overlooked his own failure to define
variability and his inclusion of environmentally
altered evidence.
In the United States the variability hypothesis
naturally found expression in the new testing move-
ment, its proponents borrowing liberally from the
theory of Ellis and the statistical technique of
Pearson. The favor that was typically afforded the
hypothesis did not stem from intellectual commit-
ment to the scientific validity of the proposal as
much as it did from personal commitment to the
social desirability of its acceptance. The vari-
ability hypothesis was most often thought of in
terms of its several corollaries: (a) genius (seldom,
and then poorly, defined) is a peculiarly male
trait; (b) men of genius naturally gravitate to
positions of power and prestige (i.e., achieve emi-
nence) by virtue of their talent; (c) an equally
high ability level should not be expected of fe-
3 One of Ellis’s biographers (Calder-Marshall, 1959, pp.
97-98) has suggested that Ellis was “wildly jealous” of
Karl Pearson’s influence on Olive Schreiner, the contro-
versial South African writer. Schreiner first met Pearson
in 1885, over a year after she had met Ellis, and according
to Calder-Marshall “was vastly attracted to him [Pearson]
in what she considered to be a selfless Hintonian sense. . . .
She regarded him as a brilliant young man, dying of
tuberculosis, whose few remaining years it was her selfless
duty to solace” (Pearson died in 1936), Calder-Marshall
summed up the triangle in few, but insinuating, phrases:
Exactly what was happening between Karl Pearson and
Olive Schreiner during these months [August 1885-
December 1886] is a matter more for any future biogra-
pher of Olive Schreiner . . . it is enough to know that
Olive did her best to remain loyal to both her friends
without telling too many lies, and that while Olive re-
mained the most important person in Havelock’s life,
the most important person in Olive’s was Karl Pearson
from the time she first met him to a considerable time
after she left England, (p. 98)
Ellis’s rivalry with Pearson could explain his bitter and
supercilious treatment of Pearson’s venture into “varia-
tional tendency,” since Ellis was not one to easily accept
an assault on his ego. For his part Pearson “despised the
Hinton group, including Ellis. He thought they were
flabby-minded, unhealthy and immoral” (p. 97). But
these opinions, while possibly influencing him to write on
variation originally, did not intrude upon a fair-minded
scientific discussion of the matter.
744 • JULY 197S • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
males; and (d) the education of women should,
therefore, be consonant with their special talents
and special place in society as wives and mothers.
WOMAN’S EDUCATION
The “appropriate” education for women had been
at issue since the Renaissance, and the implications
of the variability hypothesis favored those who had
been arguing for a separate female education. Late
in the 18th century, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
(1759-1797) questioned the “natural” roles of
each sex, contending that for both the ultimate
goal was the same: “the first object of laudable
ambition is to obtain a character as a human being,
regardless of the distinction of sex” (Wollstone-
craft, 1955, p. 5). Without education, she felt,
women could not contribute to social progress as
mature individuals, and this would be a tragic loss
to the community. Though not the first to recog-
nize the social restrictions arbitrarily placed on
women, she was the first to hold those restrictions
as directly responsible for the purported “defec-
tive nature” of women. She emphasized that wo-
men had never truly been given an equal chance
to prove or disprove their merits. Seventy years
later, John Stuart Mill (1955) also took up the
cause of women’s education, seeing it as one posi-
tive action to be taken in the direction of correct-
ing the unjust social subordination of women. He
felt that what appeared as woman’s intellectual
inferiority was actually no more than the effort to
maintain the passive-dependent role relationship
with man, her means of support:
When we put together three things—first, the natural at-
traction between the sexes; secondly, the wife’s entire de-
pendence on the husband . . . and lastly, that the principal
object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of
social ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by
her only through him, it would be a miracle if the object
of being attractive to men had not become the polar star
of feminine education and formation of character, (pp.
232-233) *
4 One of the severest critics of Mill’s defense of women
was Sigmund Freud. He felt Mill’s propositions were in
direct contradiction to woman’s “true” nature:
It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the
struggle for existence exactly as men. . . . I believe that
all reforming action in law and education would break
down in front of the fact that, long before the age at
which a man can earn a position in society, Nature has
determined woman’s destiny through beauty, charm, and
sweetness. Law and custom have much to give women
that has been withheld from them, but the position of
women will surely be what it is: in youth an adored
darling and in mature years a loved wife, (quoted in
Reeves, 1971, pp. 163-164)
Although Mill objected to fostering passivity
and dependency in girls, other educators felt that
this was precisely their duty. One of the more
influential of the 19th century, Hannah More, re-
jected outright the proposal that women should
share the same type of education as men, because
“the chief end to be proposed in cultivating the
understanding of women” was “to qualify them for
the practical purposes of life” (see Smith, 1970,
p. 101). To set one’s sights on other than har-
monious domesticity was to defy the natural order.
Her readers were advised to be excellent women
rather than indifferent men; to follow the “plain
path which Providence has obviously marked out
to the sex … rather than . . . stray awkwardly,
unbecomingly, and unsuccessfully, in a forbidden
road” (Smith, 1970, pp. 100-101). Her values
were consonant with those held by most of the
middle class, and so her Strictures on the Modern
System of Female Education (More, 1800) en-
joyed widespread popularity for some time.
By the latter part of the century, the question
had turned from whether girls should be educated
like boys to how much they should be educated
like boys. With the shift in emphasis came the
question of coeducation. One of the strongest ob-
jections to coeducation in adolescence was the
threat it posed to the “normalization” of the
menstrual period. G. Stanley Hall (1906) waxed
poetic on the issue:
At a time when her whole future life depends upon nor-
malizing the lunar month, is there not something not only
unnatural and unhygienic, but a little monstrous, in daily
school associations with boys, where she must suppress and
conceal her instincts and feelings, at those times when her
own promptings suggest withdrawal or stepping a little
aside to let Lord Nature do his magnificent work of
efflorescence, (p. S90)
Edward Clarke (see Sinclair, 1965, p. 123) had
earlier elucidated the physiological reason for the
restraint of girls from exertion in their studies: by
forcing their brains to do work at puberty, they
would use up blood later needed for menstruation.
Hall proposed an educational system for girls
that would not only take into consideration their
delicate physical nature but would also be tailored
to prepare them for their special role in society. He
feared that women’s competition with men “in the
world” would cause them to neglect their instinc-
tive maternal urges and so bring about “race sui-
cide.” Because the glory of the female lay in
motherhood, Hall believed that all educational and
social institutions should be structured with that
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 1975 • 745
end in mind. Domestic arts would therefore be
emphasized in special schools for adolescent girls,
and disciplines such as philosophy, chemistry, and
mathematics would be treated only superficially.
If a girl had a notion to stay in the “male” sys-
tem, she should be able to, but, Hall warned, such
a woman selfishly interested in self-fulfillment
would also be less likely to bear children and so be
confined to an “agamic” life, thus failing to re-
produce those very qualities that made her strong
(Hall, 1918).
Throughout Hall’s panegyric upon the beauties
of female domestic education, there runs an under-
current of the real threat that he perceived in co-
education, and that was the “feminization” of the
American male. David Starr Jordan (1902) shared
this objection but felt that coeducation would
nevertheless make young men more “civilized” and
young women less frivolous, tempering their natural
pubescent inclinations. He was no champion of
female ability though, stressing that women “on
the whole, lack originality” (p. 100). The edu-
cated woman, he said, “is likely to master technic
rather than art; method, rather than substance.
She may know a good deal, but she can do noth-
ing” (p. 101). In spite of this, he did assert that
their training is just as serious and important as
that of men. His position strongly favored the
notion that the smaller range of female ability was
the cause of lackluster female academic perform-
ance.
The issue of coeducation was not easily settled,
and even as late as 1935, one finds debates over
its relative merits (Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences, 193S, pp. 614-617).
THE BIOLOGICAL BASES OF SEX DIFFERENCES
The variability hypothesis was compatible not only
with prevailing attitudes concerning the appropri-
ate form of female education but also with a highly
popular theory of the biological complementarity
of the sexes. The main tenet of Geddes and
Thomson’s (1890) theory was that males are pri-
marily “catabolic,” females “anabolic.” From this
difference in metabolism, all other sex differences
in physical, intellectual, and emotional makeup
were derived. The male was more agile, creative,
and variable; the female was truer to the species
type and therefore, in all respects, less variable.
The conservatism of the female insured the con-
tinuity of the species. The authors stressed the
metabolic antecedents of female conservatism and
male differentiation rather than variational ten-
dency per se, and also put emphasis on the com-
plementarity of the two natures:
The feminine passivity is expressed in greater patience, more
open-mindedness, greater appreciation of subtle details,
and consequently what we call more rapid intuition. The
masculine activity lends a greater power of maximum
effort, of scientific insight, or cerebral experiment with
impressions, and is associated with an unobservant or
impatient disregard of minute details, but with a more
stronger grasp of generalities, (p. 271)
The presentation of evolutionary theory anchored
in yin-yang concepts of function represents the
most positive evaluation of the female sex offered
by 19th-century science. Whatever woman’s short-
comings, they were necessary to complete her
nature, which itself was necessary to complete
man’s: “Man thinks more, woman feels more. He
discovers more, but remembers less; she is more
receptive, and less forgetful” (Geddes & Thomson,
1890, p. 271) .
VARIABILITY AND THE TESTING MOVEMENT
Helen Thompson (later Woolley) put Geddes and
Thomson’s and other theories of sex differences in
ability to what she felt was a crucial experimental
test (see Thompson, 1903). Twenty-five men and
25 women participated in nearly 20 hours of indi-
vidual testing of their intellectual, motor, and
sensory abilities. Of more importance than her
experimental results (whether men or women can
tap a telegraph key more times per minute has
lost its significance to psychology) was her discus-
sion of the implications of the resulting negligible
differences for current theories of sex differences.
She was especially critical of the mass of incon-
sistencies inherent in contemporary biological
theories:
Women are said to represent concentration, patience, and
stability in emotional life. One might logically conclude
that prolonged concentration of attention and unbiased
generalization would be their intellectual characteristics,
but these are the very characteristics assigned to men. (p.
173)
In the face of such contradictions, she was forced
to conclude that “if the author’s views as to the
mental differences of sex had been different, they
might as easily have derived a very different set
of characteristics” (pp. 173-174). Thompson
singled out the variability hypothesis for special
criticism, objecting not only to the use of physical
variation as evidence for intellectual variation but
746 • JULY 1975 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
also to the tendency to minimize environmental
influences. She held that training was responsible
for sex differences in variation, and to those who
countered that it is really a fundamental difference
of instincts and characteristics that determines the
differences in training, she replied that if this were
true, “it would not be necessary to spend so much
time and effort in making boys and girls follow
the lines of conduct proper to their sex” (p. 181).
Thompson’s recommendation to look at environ-
mental factors went unheeded, as more and more
evidence of woman’s incapability of attaining emi-
nence was amassed. In the surveys of eminent
persons that were popular at the turn of the cen-
tury, more credence was given to nature (a la
Hall) than nurture (a la Thompson) for the near
absence of eminent women (Cattell, 1903; Ellis,
1904). Cattell (1903) found a ready-made ex-
planation in the variability hypothesis: “Women
depart less from the normal than man,” ergo “the
distribution of women is represented by a narrower
bell-shaped curve” (p. 375). Cora Castle’s (1913)
survey of eminent women was no less critical of
woman’s failure to achieve at the top levels of
power and prestige.
One of the most influential individuals to take
up the cause of the variability hypothesis was
Edward Thorndike. Much of the early work in
the testing movement was done at Columbia Uni-
versity, which provided the perfect milieu for
Thorndike’s forays into the variability problem
as applied to mental testing and educational phi-
losophy. Thorndike based his case for the ac-
ceptance of the variability hypothesis on the re-
evaluation of the results of two studies (Thompson,
1903; Wissler, 1901) that had not themselves been
directed toward the issue. Thorndike insisted that
greater male variability only became meaningful
when one examined the distribution of ability at
the highest levels of giftedness. Measurement of
more general sex differences could only “prove that
the sexes are closely alike and that sex can account
for only a very small fraction of human mental
differences in the abilities listed” (Thorndike,
1910, p. 185). Since the range of female ability
was narrower, he reasoned, the talents of women
should be channeled into fields in which they would
be most needed and most successful because “this
one fundamental difference in variability is more
important than all the differences between the
average male and female capacities” (Thorndike,
1906):
Not only the probability and the desirability of marriage
and the training of children as an essential feature of
woman’s career, but also the restriction of women to the
mediocre grades of ability and achievement should be
reckoned with by our educational systems. The education
of women for … professions . . . where a very few gifted
individuals are what society requires, is far less needed than
for such professions as nursing, teaching, medicine, or
architecture, where the average level is the essential, (p.
213)
He felt perfectly justified in this recommendation
because of “the patent fact that in the great
achievements of the world in science, as, invention,
and management, women have been far excelled
by men” (Thorndike, 1910, p. 35). In Thorndike’s
view, environmental factors scarcely mattered.
Others, like Joseph Jastrow (1915), seemed to
recognize the tremendous influence that societal
pressures had upon achievement. He noted that
even when women had been admitted to employ-
ment from which they had previously been ex-
cluded, new prejudices arose: “allowances and
considerations for sex intrude, favorably or un-
favorably; the avenues of preferment, though
ostensibly open are really barred by invisible bar-
riers of social prejudice” (pp. 5,67-568). This was
little more than lip service because he was even
more committed to the importance of variational
tendency and its predominance over any possible
extenuating factors: the effects of the variability
of the male and the biological conservatism of the
female “radiates to every distinctive aspect of
their contrasted natures and expressions” (p. 568).
A small but persistent minority challenged the
validity of the variability hypothesis, and it is not
surprising that this minority was composed mainly
of women. Although the “woman question” was,
to some degree, at issue, the larger dispute was be-
tween .those who stressed “nature” as the major
determinant of ability (and therefore success) and
those who rejected nature and its corollary, instead
emphasizing the importance of environmental
factors. Helen Thompson Woolley, while remain-
ing firmly committed to the investigation of the
differential effects of social factors on each sex, did
not directly involve herself in the variability con-
troversy. Leta Stetter Hollingworth, first a stu-
dent and then a colleague of Thorndike’s at
Teachers College of Columbia University, actively
investigated the validity of the hypothesis and
presented sound objections to it. She argued that
there was no real basis for assuming that the dis-
tribution of “mental traits” in the population con-
forms without exception to the Gaussian distribu-
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 1975 • 747
tion. The assumption of normality was extremely
important to the validity of the variability hypothe-
sis, because only in a normal distribution would a
difference in variability indicate a difference in
range. It was the greater range of male ability
that was used to “prove” the ultimate superiority
of male ability. Greater range of male ability was
usually verified by citing lists of eminent persons
(dominated by men) and the numbers and sex of
those in institutions for the feebleminded (also
dominated by men). Hollingworth (1914) saw
no reason to resort to biological theory for an ex-
planation of the phenomenon when a more parsi-
monious one was available in social fact. Statistics
reporting a larger number of males among the
feebleminded could be explained by the fact that
the supporting data had been gathered in institu-
tions, where men were more likely to be admitted
than women of an equal degree of retardation. The
better ability of feebleminded women to survive
outside the institutional setting was simply a func-
tion of female social role:
Women have been and are a dependent and non-competi-
tive class, and when defective can more easily survive out-
side of institutions, since they do not have to compete
mentally with normal individuals, as men do, to maintain
themselves in the social milieu. (Hollingworth, 1914, p.
515)
Women would therefore be more likely to be in-
stitutionalized at an older age than men, after they
had become too old to be “useful” or self-support-
ing. A survey of age and sex ratios in New York
institutions supported her hypothesis: the ratio
of females to males increased with the age of the
inmates (Hollingworth, 1913). As for the rarity
of eminence among women, Hollingworth (1914)
argued that because the social role of women was
denned in terms of housekeeping and child-rearing
functions, “a field where eminence is not possible,”
and because of concomitant constraints placed on
the education and employment of women by law,
custom, and the demands of the role, one could not
possibly validly compare the achievements of wo-
men with those of men who “have followed the
greatest possible range of occupations, and have at
the same time procreated unhindered” (p. 528).
She repeatedly emphasized (Hollingworth, 1914,
1916) that the true potential of woman could only
be known when she began to receive social accep-
tance of her right to choose career, maternity, or
both.
Hollingworth’s argument that unrecognized dif-
ferences in social training had misdirected the
search for inherent sex differences had earlier been
voiced by Mary Calkins (1896). Just as Holling-
worth directed her response particularly at Thorn-
dike’s formulation of the variability hypothesis,
Calkins objected to Jastrow’s (1896) intimations
that one finds “greater uniformity amongst women
than amongst men” (p. 431).
Hollingworth’s work was instrumental in bring-
ing the variability issue to a crisis point, not only
because she presented persuasive empirical data to
support her contentions but also because this was
simply the first major opposition that the vari-
ability hypothesis had encountered. Real resolu-
tion of this crisis had to await the development of
more sophisticated testing and statistical tech-
niques. With the United States’ involvement in
World War I, most testing efforts were redirected
to wartime uses. This redirection effectively termi-
nated the variability debate, and although it re-
sumed during the postwar years, the renewed con-
troversy never attained the force of conviction that
had characterized the earlier period. “Variational
tendency” became a statistical issue, and the
pedagogic implications that had earlier colored the
debate were either minimized or disguised in more
egalitarian terms.
After its revival in the mid-1920s, investigation
of the variability hypothesis was often undertaken
as part of larger intelligence testing projects. Evi-
dence in its favor began to look more convincing
than it ever had. The use of larger samples,
standardized tests, and newer methods of comput-
ing variation gave an appearance of increased ac-
curacy, but conclusions were still based on insub-
stantial evidence of questionable character. Most
discussions of the topic concluded that there were
not enough valid data to resolve the issue and that
even if that data were available, variation within
each sex is so much greater than the difference in
variation between sexes that the “meaning” of the
variability hypothesis was trivial (Shields, Note 1).
Maternal Instinct
The concept of maternal instinct was firmly en-
trenched in American psychology before American
psychology itself existed as an entity. The first
book to appear in the United States with “psy-
chology” in its title outlined the psychological sex
differences arising from the physical differences
748 • JULY 1975 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
between men and women. Differences in structure
were assumed to imply differences in function, and
therefore differences in abilities, temperament, and
intelligence. In each sex a different set of physical
systems was thought to predominate: “In man the
arterial and cerebral systems prevail, and with
them irritability; in woman the venous and gan-
glion systems and with them plasticity and sensi-
bility” (Rausch, 1841, p. 81). The systems domi-
nant in woman caused her greatest attributes to
lie in the moral sphere in the form of love, patience,
and chastity. In the intellectual sphere, she was
not equally blessed, “and this is not accidental,
not because no opportunity has offered itself to
their productive genius . . . but because it is their
highest happiness to be mothers” (Rausch, 1841,
p.83).6
Although there was popular acceptance of a
maternal instinct in this country, the primary
impetus for its incorporation into psychology came
by way of British discussion of social evolution.
While the variability hypothesis gained attention
because of an argument, the concept of maternal
instinct evolved without conflict. There was con-
sistent agreement as to its existence, if not its pre-
cise nature or form. Typical of the evolutionary
point of view was the notion that woman’s emo-
tional nature (including her tendency to nurtur-
ance) was a direct consequence of her reproductive
physiology. As Herbert Spencer (1891) explained
it, the female’s energies were directed toward
preparation for pregnancy and lactation, reducing
the energy available for the development of other
qualities. This resulted in a “rather earlier cessa-
tion of individual evolution” in the female. Wo-
man was, in essence, a stunted man. Her lower
stage of development was evident not only in her
inferior mental and emotional powers but also in
the resulting expression of the parental instinct.
Whereas the objectivity of the male caused his con-
cern to be extended “to all the relatively weak who
are dependent upon him” (p. 375), the female’s
propensity to “dwell on the concrete and proximate
rather than on the abstract and remote” made her
incapable of the generalized protective attitude as-
sumed by the male. Instead, she was primarily re-
sponsive to “infantile helplessness.”
Alexander Sutherland (1898) also described a
parental instinct whose major characteristic (con-
cern for the weak) was “the basis of all other
sympathy,” which is itself “the ultimate basis of
all moral feeling” (p. 1S6). Like his contempo-
raries (e.g., McDougall, 1913, 1923; Shand, 1920;
Spencer, 1891), Sutherland revered maternal senti-
ment but thought the expression of parental in-
stinct in the male, that is, a protective attitude,
was a much more significant factor in social evolu-
tion, an attitude of benevolent paternalism more
in keeping with Victorian social ethic than biologi-
cal reality. The expression of the parental instinct
in men, Sutherland thought, must necessarily lead
to deference toward women out of “sympathetic
regard for women’s weakness.” He noted that
male protectiveness had indeed’ wrought a change
in the relations between the sexes, evident in a
trend away from sexual motivations and toward a
general improvement in moral tone, witness the
“large number of men who lead perfectly chaste
lives for ten or twenty years after puberty before
they marry,” which demonstrated that the “sen-
suous side of man’s nature is slowly passing under
the control of sympathetic sentiments” (p. 288).a
Whatever facet of the activity that was empha-
sized, there was common agreement that the ma-
ternal (or parental) instinct was truly an instinct.
A. F. Shand (1920) argued that the maternal in-
stinct is actually composed of an ordered “system”
of instincts and characterized by a number of emo-
tions. Despite its complexity, “maternal love” was
considered to be a hereditary trait “in respect not
only of its instincts, but also of the bond connect-
ing its primary emotions, and of the end which the
whole system pursues, namely, the preservation of
the offspring” (p. 42). The sociologist L. T. Hob-
house (1916) agreed that maternal instinct was a
“true” instinct, “not only in the drive but in some
of the detail.” He doubted the existence of a cor-
responding paternal instinct, however, since he had
observed that few men have a natural aptitude with
•
babies.
5 This sentiment was echoed by Bruno Bettelheim (1965)
over 100 years later: “as much as women want to be
good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost
to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers”
(P. IS).
8 Similar observations were made concerning women.
Sutherland (1898) noted that because social morality
had developed to such a high level, women “now largely
enter upon marriage out of purely sympathetic attrac-
tions, in which sex counts for something, but with all
its grosser aspects gone.” He happily reported another’s
finding that “sexual desire enters not at all into the minds
of a very large proportion of women when contemplating
matrimony” (p. 288).
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 197S • 749
The unquestioning acceptance of the maternal
instinct concept was just as prevalent in this
country as it was in Britain. William James (1950)
listed parental love among the instincts of humans
and emphasized the strength with which it was
expressed in women. He was particularly im-
pressed with the mother-infant relationship and
quoted at length from a German psychologist con-
cerning the changes wrought in a woman at the
birth of her child: “She has, in one word, trans-
ferred her entire egoism to the child, and lives only
in it” (p. 439). Even among those who employed
a much narrower definition of instinct than James,
maternal behavior was thought to be mediated by
inherent neural connections. R. P. Halleck (1895)
argued that comparatively few instincts are fully
developed in humans, because reason intervenes
and modifies their expression to fit the circum-
stances. Maternal instinct qualified as a clear ex-
ception, and its expression seemed as primitive and
unrefined as that of infants’ reflexive behavior.
Others (e.g., Jastrow, 1915; Thorndike, 1914a,
1914b) treated instinct more as a quality of char-
acter than of biology. Edward Thorndike (1911)
considered the instincts peculiar to each sex to be
the primary source of sex differences: “it appears
that if the primary sex characters—the instincts
directly related to courtship, love, child-bearing,
and nursing—are left out of account, the average
man differs from the average woman far less than
many men differ from one another” (p. 30).
Thorndike taught that the tendency to display
maternal concern was universal among women, al-
though social pressures could “complicate or de-
form” it. He conceded that males share in an
instinctive “good will toward children,” but other
instincts, such as the “hunting instinct,” predomi-
nated (Thorndike, 1914b). He was so sure of the
innate instinctual differences between men and wo-
men that it was his contention (Thorndike, 1914b)
that even “if we should keep the environment of
boys and girls absolutely similar these instincts
would produce, sure and important differences be-
tween the mental and moral activities of boys and
girls” (p. 203). The expression of instincts there-
fore was thought to have far-reaching effects on
seemingly unrelated areas of ability and conduct.
For example, woman’s “nursing instinct,” which
was most often exhibited in “unreasoning tenden-
cies to pet, coddle, and ‘do for* others,” was also
“the chief source of woman’s superiorities in the
moral life” (Thorndike, 1914a, p. 203). Another
of the female’s instinctive tendencies was described
as “submission to mastery”:
Women in general are thus by original nature submissive
to men in general. Submissive behavior is apparently not
annoying when assumed as the instinctive response to its
natural stimulus. Indeed, it is perhaps a common satisfier.
(Thorndike, 1914b, p. 34)
The existence of such an “instinct” would, of
course, validate the social norm of female sub-
servience and dependence. An assertive woman
would be acting contrary to instinct and therefore
contrary to nature. There is a striking similarity
between Thorndike’s description of female .nature
and that of the Freudians with their mutual empha-
sis on woman’s passivity, dependency, and masoch-
ism. For Thorndike, however, the cause of such a
female attitude was thought to be something quite
different from mutilation fears and penis envy.
The most vocal proponent of instinct, first in
England and later in this country, was William
McDougall (1923). Unlike Shand, he regarded
“parental sentiment” as a primary instinct and did
not hesitate to be highly critical of those who disa-
greed with him. When his position was maligned
by the behaviorists, his counterattack was es-
pecially strong:
And, when we notice how in so many ways the behavior
of the human mother most closely resembles that of the
animal-mother, can we doubt that . . . if the animal-
mother is moved by the impulse of a maternal instinct, so
also is the woman? To repudiate this view as baseless
would seem to me the height of blindness and folly, yet
it is the folly of a number of psychologists who pride them-
selves on being strictly “scientific.” (p. 136)
In McDougall’s system of instincts, each of the
primary instincts in humans was accompanied by a
particular emotional quality. The parental instinct
had as its primary emotional quality the “tender
emotion” vaguely defined as love, tenderness, and
tender feeling. Another of the primary instincts
was that of “pairing,” its primary emotional
quality that of sexual emotion or . excitement,
“sometimes called love—-an unfortunate and con-
fusing usage” (p. 234). Highly critical of what he
called the “Freudian dogma that all love is sexual,”
McDougall proposed that it was the interaction of
the parental and pairing instincts that was the basis
of heterosexual “love.” “Female coyness,” which
initiated the courtship ritual, was simply the repro-
ductively oriented manifestation of the instincts of
self-display and self-abasement. The appearance
of a suitable male would elicit coyness from the
female, and at that point the male’s parental in-
750 • JULY 1975 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
stinct would come into play:
A certain physical weakness and delicacy (probably moral
also) about the normal young woman or girl constitute in
her a resemblance to a child. This resemblance . . . throws
the man habitually into the protective attitude, evokes the
impulse and emotion of the parental instinct. He feels
that he wants to protect and shield and help her in every
way. (p. 425)
Once the “sexual impulse” had added its energy to
the relationship, the young man was surely trapped,
and the survival of the species was insured. Mc-
Dougall, while firmly committed to the importance
of instinct all the way up the evolutionary ladder,
never lost his sense of Victorian delicacy: while
pairing simply meant reproduction in lower ani-
mals, in humans it was accorded a tone of gallantry
and concern. ;
The fate of instinct at the hands of the radical
behaviorists is a well-known tale. Perhaps the
most adamant, as well as notorious, critic of the
instinct concept was J. B. Watson (1926). Like
those before him who had relied upon observation
to prove the existence of maternal instinct, he used
observation to confirm its nonexistence:
We have observed the nursing, handling, bathing, etc. of
the first baby of a good many mothers. Certainly there
are no new ready-made activities appearing except nursing.
The mother is usually as awkward about that as she can
well be. The instinctive factors are practically nil. (p. 54)
Watson attributed the appearance of instinctive
behavior to the mother’s effort to conform to
societal expectations of her successful role per-
formance. He, like the 19th-century British asso-
ciationist Alexander Bain, speculated that not a
little of the mother’s pleasure in nursing and caring
for the infant was due to the sexually stimulating
effect of those activities.7
Even the most dedicated behaviorists hedged a
bit when it came to discarding the idea of instinct
altogether. Although the teleology and redundancy
of the concept of instinct were sharply criticized,
some belief in “instinctive activity” was typically
retained (cf. Dunlap, 1919-1920). W. B. Pills-
bury (1926), for example, believed that the par-
7 Bain’s (187S) position was similar except that he be-
lieved that there was an innate tendency to nurture that
initiated the entire cycle of positive affect-positive action.
The instinct was thought to be a natural “sentiment,”
which was fostered by the long period of gestation and
the “special energies” required of the mother to sustain
the infant. The positive affect arising from activity con-
nected with the infant then brought about increased
nurturance and increased pleasure. At least part of this
pleasure was thought to be physical in nature.
ental instinct was a “secondary” instinct. Physical
attraction to the infant guided the mother’s first
positive movements toward the infant, but trial
and error guided her subsequent care. Instinct
was thought of as that quality which set the entire
pattern of maternal behavior in motion.
In time instinct was translated into drive and
motivation, refined concepts more in keeping with
behavioristic theory. Concomitantly, interest in
the maternal instinct of human females gave way
to the study of mothering behavior in rodents. The
concept of maternal instinct did find a place in
psychoanalytic theory, but its definition bore little
resemblance to that previously popular. Not only
did maternal instinct lose the connotation of pro-
tectiveness and gentility that an earlier generation
of psychologists had ascribed to it, but it was re-
garded as basically sexual, masochistic, and even
destructive in nature (cf. Rheingold, 1964).
The Ascendancy
oj Psychoanalytic Theory
The functionalists, because of their emphasis on
“nature,” were predictably indifferent to the study
of social sex roles and cultural concepts of mascu-
line and feminine. The behaviorists, despite their
emphasis on “nurture,” were slow to recognize
those same social forces. During the early 1930s,
there was little meaningful ongoing research in
female psychology: the point of view taken by the
functionalists was no longer a viable one, and the
behaviorists with their emphasis on nonsocial topics
(i.e., learning and motivation) had no time for
serious consideration of sex differences. While the
functionalists had defined laws of behavior that
mirrored the society of the times, behaviorists con-
centrated their efforts on defining universal laws
that operated in any time, place, or organism.
Individual differences in nature were “expected dur-
ing the functionalist era because they were the sine
qua non of a Darwinian view of the world and of
science. The same individual differences were
anathema to early learning-centered psychology
because, no longer necessary or expedient, they
were a threat to the formulation of universal laws
of behavior.
In the hiatus created by the capitulation of func-
tionalism to behaviorism, the study of sex differ-
ences and female nature fell within the domain of
psychoanalytic theory—the theory purported to
have all the answers. Freudian theory (or some
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 1975 • 7S1
form of it) had for some years already served as
the basis for a psychology of female physiological
function (cf. Benedek &’Rubenstein, 1939). The
application of principles popular in psychiatry and
medicine (and their inescapable identification with
pathology) to academic psychology was easily ac-
complished. Psychoanalytic theory provided psy-
chology with the first comprehensive theoretical
explanation of sex differences. Its novelty in that
respect aided its assimilation.
Psychology proper, as well as the general public,
had been well-prepared for a biological, and frankly
sexual, theory of male and female nature. Have-
lock Ellis, although himself ambivalent and even
hostile toward Freudian teachings, had done much
through his writing to encourage openness in the
discussion of sexuality. He brought a number of
hitherto unmentionable issues to open discussion,
couching them in the commonly accepted notion of
the complementarity of the sexes, thus insuring
their popular acceptance. Emphasis on masculinity
and’ femininity as real dimensions of personality
appeared in the mid-1930s in the form of the
Terman Masculinity-Femininity Scale (Terman &
Miles, 1968). Although Lewis Terman himself
avoided discussion of whether masculinity and
femininity were products of nature or nurture,
social determinants of masculinity and femininity
were commonly deemphasized in favor of the no-
tion that they were a type of psychological second-
ary sexual characteristic. Acceptance of social
sex role soon came to be perceived as an indicator
of one’s mental health.
The traps inherent in a purely psychoanalytic
concept of female nature were seldom recognized.
John Dewey’s (1957) observation, made in 1922,
merits attention, not only for its accuracy but be-
cause its substance can be found in present-day
refutations of the adequacy of psychoanalytic
theory as an explanation of woman’s behavior and
“nature”:
The treatment of sex by psycho-analysts is most instruc-
tive, for it flagrantly exhibits both the consequences of
artificial simplification and the transformation of social
results into psychic causes. Writers, usually male, hold
forth on the psychology of women, as if they were dealing
with a Platonic universal entity, although they habitually
treat men as individuals, varying with structure and en-
vironment. They treat phenomena which are peculiarly
symptoms of civilization of the West at the present time
as if they were the necessary effects of fixed nature impulses
of human nature, (pp. 143-144)
The identification of the psychology of women
with psychoanalytic theory was nearly complete by
tlfe mid-1930s and was so successful that many
ychologists today, even those most deeply in-
Ived in the current movement for a psychology
women, are not aware that there was a psychol-
y of women long before there was a Sigmund
eud. This article has dealt only with a brief
;riod in that history, and then only with the most
significant topics of that period. Lesser issues were
ten just as hotly debated, for example, whether
there is an innate difference in the style of hand-
writing of men and women (cf. Allen, 1927;
Downey, 1910).
And what has happened to the issues of brain
size, variability, and maternal instinct since the
1930s? Where they are politically and socially
useful, they have an uncanny knack of reappearing,
albeit in an altered form. For example, the search
for central nervous system differences between
males and females has continued. Perhaps the
most popular form this search has taken is the
theory of prenatal, hormonal “organization” of the
hypothalamus into exclusively male or female
patterns of function (Harris & Levine, 196S). The
proponents of this theory maintain an Aristotelian
view of woman as an incomplete man:
In the development of the embryo, nature’s first choice or
primal impulse is to differentiate a female. . . . The principle
of differentiation is always that to obtain a male, some-
thing must be added. Subtract that something, and the
result will be a female. (Money, 1970, p. 428)
The concept of maternal instinct, on the other
hand, has recently been taken up and refashioned
by a segment of the woman’s movement. Pregnancy
and childbirth are acclaimed as important expres-
sions of womanliness whose satisfactions cannot be
truly appreciated by males. The idea that women
are burdened with “unreasoning tendencies to pet,
coddle, and ‘do for’ others” has been disposed of
by others and replaced by the semiserious proposal
that if any “instinctive” component of parental
concern exists, it is a peculiarly male attribute
(Stannard, 1970). The variability hypothesis is
all but absent from contemporary psychological
work, but if it ever again promises a viable justi-
fication for existing social values, it will be back
as strongly as ever. Conditions which would favor
its revival include the renaissance of rugged indi-
vidualism or the “need” to suppress some segment
of society, for example, women’s aspirations to
positions of power. In the first case the hypothesis
would serve to reaffirm that there are those “born
to lead,” and in the latter that there are those
“destined to follow.”
752 • JULY 1975 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
Of more importance than the issues themselves
or their fate in contemporary psychology is the
recognition of the role that they have played his-
torically in the psychology of women: the role of
social myth. Graves (1968, p. v) included among
the functions of mythologizing that of justification
of existing social systems. This function was
clearly operative throughout the evolutionist-func-
tionalist treatment of the psychology of women:
the “discovery” of sex differences in brain struc-
ture to correspond to “appropriate” sex differences
in brain function; the biological justification (via
the variability hypothesis) for the enforcement of
woman’s subordinate social status; the Victorian
weakness and gentility associated with maternity;
and pervading each of these themes, the assumption
of an innate emotional, sexless, unimaginative fe-
male character that played the perfect foil to the
Darwinian male. That science played handmaiden
to social values cannot be denied. Whether a
parallel situation exists in today’s study of sex
differences is open to question.
REFERENCE NOTE
1. Shields, S. A. The variability hypothesis and sex dif-
ferences in intelligence. Unpublished manuscript, 1974.
(Available from Department of Psychology, Pennsyl-
vania State University.)
REFERENCES
Allen, C. N. Studies in sex differences. Psychological
Bulletin, 1927, 24, 294-304.
Bain, A. Mental science. New York: Appleton, 1875.
Benedek, T., & Rubenstein, B. B. The correlations between
ovarian activity and psychodynamic processes. II. The
menstrual phase. Psychosomatic Medicine, 1939, 1,
461-485.
Bettelheim, B. The commitment required of a woman
entering a scientific profession in present-day American
society. In J. A. Mattfield & C. G. Van Aken (Eds.),
Women and the scientific professions. Cambridge, Mass.:
M.I.T. Press, 1965.
Burt, C., & Moore, R. C. The mental differences between
the sexes. Journal of Experimental Pedagogy, 1912, 1,
355-388.
Calder-Marshall, A. The sage of sex. New York: Putnam,
1959.
Calkins, M. W. ‘Community of ideas of men and women.
Psychological Review, 1896, 3, 426-430.
Castle, C. A. A statistical study of eminent women.
Columbia Contributions to Philosophy and Psychology,
1913,22(27).
Cattell, J. McK. A statistical study of eminent men.
Popular Science Monthly, 1903, 62, 359-377.
Darwin, C. The descent of man (2nd ed.). London: John
Murray, 1922. (Originally published, 1871; 2nd edition
originally published, 1874.)
Dewey, J. Human nature and conduct. New York:
Random House, 1957.
Downey, J. E. Judgment on the sex of handwriting. Psy-
chological Review, 1910,17, 205-216.
Dunlap, J. Are there any instincts? Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology, 1919-1920,14, 307-311.
Elliott, H. C. Textbook of neuroanatomy (2nd ed.).
Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969.
Ellis, H. Man and woman: A study of human secondary
sexual characters. London: Walter Scott; New York:
Scribner’s, 1894.
Ellis, H. Variation in man and woman. Popular Science
Monthly, 1903, 62, 237-253.
Ellis, H. A study of British genius. London: Hurst &
Blackett, 1904.
Ellis, H. Man and woman, a study of secondary and
tertiary sexual characteristics (8th rev. ed.). London:
Heinemann, 1934.
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Mac-
millan, 1935.
Galton, F. Inquiries into the human faculty and its de-
velopment. London: Dent, 1907.
Geddes, P., & Thomson, J. A. The evolution of sex. New
York: Scribner & Welford, 1890.
Graves, R. Introduction. In New Larousse encyclopedia
of mythology (Rev. ed.). London: Paul Hamlyn, 1968.
Hall, G. S. The question of coeducation. Munsey’s
Magazine, 1906, 34, 588-592.
Hall, G. S. Youth, its education, regimen and hygiene.
New York: Appleton, 1918.
Halleck, R. Psychology and psychic culture. New York:
American Book, 1895.
Harris, G. W., & Levine, S. Sexual differentiation of the
brain and its experimental control. Journal of Physiol-
ogy, 1965,181, 379-400.
Hobhouse, L. Morals in evolution. New York: Holt, 1916.
Hollingworth, L. S. The frequency of amentia as related
to sex. Medical Record, 1913, 84, 753-756.
Hollingworth, L. S. Variability as related to sex differ-
ences in achievement. American Journal of Sociology,
1914, IP, 510-530.
Hollingworth, L. S. Social devices for impelling women
to bear and rear children. American Journal of Sociol-
ogy, 1916, 22, 19-29.
Huarte, J. The examination of mens wits (trans, from
Spanish to Italian by M. Camilli; trans, from Italian to
English by R. Carew). Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1959.
James, W. The principles of psychology. New York:
Dover, 1950.
Jastrow, J. Note on Calkins’ “Community of ideas of
men and women.” Psychological Review, 1896, 3, 430-
431.
Jastrow, J. Character and temperament. New York:
Appletori, 1915.
Jordan, D. S. The higher education of women. Popular
Science Monthly, 1902, 62, 97-107,
Mall, F. P. On several anatomical characters of the human
brain, said to vary according to race and sex, with
especial reference to the weight of the frontal lobe.
American Journal of Anatomy, 1909, 9, 1-32.
McDougall, W. An introduction to social psychology (7th
ed.). London: Methuen, 1913.
McDougall, W. Outline of psychology. New York:
Scriibner’s, 1923.
Meyer, M, Psychology of the other-one. Columbia:
Missouri Book, 1921.
Mill, J. S. The subjection of women. London: Dent, 1955.
Mobius, P. J. The physiological mental weakness of
woman (A. McCorn, Trans.). Alienist and Neurologist,
1901,22, 624-642.
Money, J. Sexual dimorphism and homosexual gender
identity. Psychological Bulletin, 1970, 74, 425-440.
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • JULY 197S • 7S3
More, H. Strictures on the modern system of female edu-
cation. With a view of the principles and conduct
prevalent among women of rank and fortune. Phila-
delphia, Pa.: Printed by Budd and Bertram for Thomas
Dobson, 1800.
Patrick, G. T. W. The psychology of women. Popular
Science Monthly, 1895, 47, 209-225.
Pearson, K. Variation in man and woman. In The
chances of death (Vol. 1). London: Edward Arnold,
1897.
Pillsbury, W. B. Education as the psychologist sees it.
New York: Macmillan, 1926.
Porteus, S., & Babcock, M. E. Temperament and race.
Boston: Gorham Press, 1926.
Rausch, F. A. Psychology; Or, a view of the human soul
including anthropology (2nd rev. ed.). New York:
Dodd, 1841.
Reeves, N. Womankind. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971.
Rheingold, J. The fear of being a woman. New York:
Grune & Stratton, 1964.
Romanes, G. J. Mental differences between men and
women. Nineteenth Century, 1887, 21, 654-672.
Shand, A. F. The foundations of character. London:
Macmillan, 1920.
Sinclair, A. The better half: The emancipation of the
American woman. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
Smith, P. Daughters of the promised land. Boston: Little,
Brown, 1970.
Spencer, H. The study of sociology. New York: Apple-
ton, 1891.
Stannard, U. Adam’s rib, or the woman within. Trans-
Action, 1970, 8, 24-35.
Sutherland, A. The origin and growth of the moral in-
stinct (Vol. 1). London: Longmans, Green, 1898.
Terman, L., & Miles, C. C. Sex and personality. New
York: Russell and Russell, 1968.
Thompson, H. B. The mental traits of sex. Chicago: Uni-
veristy of Chicago Press, 1903.
Thorndike, E, L. Sex in education. The Bookman, 1906,
23, 211-214.
Thorndike, E. L. Educational psychology (2nd ed.). New
York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1910.
Thorndike, E. L. Individuality. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1911.
Thorndike, E. L. Educational psychology (Vol. 3). New
York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1914. (a)
Thorndike, E. L. Educational psychology briefer course.
New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1914.
(b)
Walker, A. Woman physiologically considered. New York:
J. & H. G. Langley, 1850.
Watson, J. B. Studies on the growth of the emotions.
In Psychologies of 1925. Worcester, Mass.: Clark Uni-
versity Press, 1926.
Weininger, O. Sex and character (trans.). London-
Heinemann, 1906.
Wissler, C. The correlation of mental and physical tests.
Psychological Review Monograph Supplements, 1899-
1901, 3(6, Whole No. 16).
Wollstonecraft, M. A vindication of the rights of woman.
New York: Button, 1955.
Woolley, H. T. Psychological literature: A review of the
recent literature on the psychology of sex. Psychological
Bulletin, 1910, 7, 335-342.
Wundt, W. Ethics. Vol. 3: The principles of morality, and
the departments of the moral life (M. F. Washburn,
Trans.). London: Sonnenschein, 1901.
754 • JULY 19 75 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
