Leta Stetter Hollingworth, Educator, Psychologist & Feminist
Leta Stetter Hollingworth, born Leta Hollingworth on May 25, 1886, was raised in an abusive home for a large portion of her childhood. Her mother died when she was only three-years-old. Her father left the family, leaving Leta and her two younger sisters to live with their maternal grandparents in Nebraska. Nearly a decade later, however, she and her sisters would move back in with her father when Leta was 12. Her father was an abusive alcoholic, and Leta found herself writing poetry and studying to escape her home life. At the age of 14, her first poem was published in a local paper, and when she graduated high school, she took an opportunity to leave her troubled past behind.
Leta enrolled in the University of Nebraska at Lincoln when she was only 16. Four years later, she earned her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. However, because of Leta’s worry that she wouldn’t be able to financially sustain herself as a writer, she began looking into teaching, another one of her passions. While in college, Leta met Harry Hollingworth, whom she would happily marry in 1908. Harry was interested in research in psychology, and when he moved to New York to continue his research, Leta moved with him.
At this point, Leta still didn’t know that she wanted to pursue a career in psychology. When she arrived in New York, she was interested in becoming a high school teacher. It was here that Leta’s life would change when she learned that married women in New York were not allowed to be high school teachers. Stripped of a job merely because she was a married woman, Leta became frustrated. She had always been progressive regarding women’s rights (in fact, she was an active member of a women’s suffrage party), but she yearned to challenge the subjective justifications that society used to suppress women.
Leta attended Columbia University to earn her master’s degree in education, after which she took a job at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives. In this job, she would administer intelligence tests, and she was fascinated with the field of intelligence research. She studied under Edward Thorndike, a famous psychologist who is best known for his research on learning. Finally, Leta earned her PhD in 1916, and she was hired at Columbia’s Teachers College. She would remain at this job for the rest of her career, but she began to carry out and publish important research on women and intelligence, guided by both her experiences in the Clearing House and in New York as a married woman who wanted to be a teacher.
First, it’s important to give some background on the many baseless ways that women were labeled as an inferior sex. Psychologists viewed women as “mediocre” (Hollingworth, 1914) largely because of something called the male variability hypothesis. Essentially, proponents of this hypothesis argued that men on average demonstrated more variation in intelligence than women. What this means is that more men than women were expected to be mentally incapacitated, falling on the extreme lower end of an intelligence distribution curve, and that more men were also expected to fall on the extreme upper end of an intelligence distribution curve. You may already know that this actually is true. Men fall more at the extremes of intelligence scores than women, meaning that on average more men are classified as “gifted” (i.e., they have an IQ score of 130 or above), and more men are classified as “intellectually disabled” (i.e., they have an IQ score of 70 or below). We know this is true today, but psychologists didn’t know this during the early to mid 20th century. Just to clarify: this does not show that the average man is more intelligent than the average woman. Men and women have the same average intelligence score, but overall, men display a greater standard deviation of intelligence, meaning that the percent of men that fall under extremely high or low intelligence scores is greater than the percent of women.
However, Leta found that the ultimate problem with the male variability hypothesis was not the idea that female intelligence fell closer to the mean IQ score. Leta was open to any conclusion that was proved with objective data and facts, and if there was sufficient evidence at the time, Leta would’ve accepted the conclusion that men displayed more variation in intelligence. Instead, Leta’s main problem with the male variability hypothesis was how it was used to justify the perspective that women were intellectually inferior to men. Many male psychologists used this hypothesis to support the idea that men were naturally smarter than women. Therefore, Leta made it her work to try and set the record straight for gender equality.
Leta took advantage of the opportunities that her work at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives had provided her. She was allowed to gather statistics about the number of women who were committed to these institutions in order to support her claim that men were not referred to mental institutions more than women. Although it may seem somewhat paradoxical for a woman to fight for gender equality by proving that there were more intellectually disabled females than others originally thought, all of Leta’s research was based on the assumption that if there were equal numbers of women and men in the Clearing House, then it could be concluded that men did not vary more in intelligence. Leta thought that proving that the number of women who were intellectually disabled was equal to the number of men who were intellectually disabled would mean that the number of women who were extremely intelligent would be the same as the number of men that were extremely intelligent.
Leta did find that more men were committed to institutions like the Clearing House, but she argued that this was because women and young girls were often confined to the house for most of their lives, and so there was no need to commit them. She thought that the number of women that were intellectually disabled would be underreported due to two main reasons. The first was that families simply may not notice that their daughter fell below the average intelligence score, since girls didn’t have the same opportunities for education, and so there was no real way to know if their daughter had an abnormally low intelligence score. The second reason that Leta thought might cause underreporting in the amount of females with low intelligence scores was that families might refuse to commit their daughter to a mental institution because she was needed for the house chores, which her intelligence would not impede.
Unfortunately, we now know that Leta was wrong, and that there actually is a difference in male and female intelligence score variation. However, this fact should not undermine Leta’s work. She was praised “by feminists as the scientific pillar of their cause” (Shields, 1990), and she helped dispel the growing theory that women were inherently intellectually inferior to men. In addition, Leta’s research on variability in intelligence scores showed that she championed “fact” over “the literature of opinion,” (Hollingworth, 1916) and that she wouldn’t stand for loosely supported claims that nevertheless came to dominate the scientific community.
However, this wouldn’t prove to be the only time that Leta would have to challenge the scientific community on its views towards women. Another myth that Leta had to dispel was the claim that women would become “incapacitated” when they menstruated. Leta began researching the psychology of women in order to investigate the claim that women “would be incapable of performing their duties [as employees] for about one week each month,” which lowered women’s prospects for being hired (“Functional Periodicity,” 1914.). Leta underwent research that investigated the mental and motor functions of women, and she compared the results when women were menstruating versus when they were not. Through her research, she proved that women do not undergo changes in motor or mental function when they are menstruating, effectively quelling some of the stigma that hung around menstrual cycles.
Leta helped disprove some of the lies about women that were floating around the scientific community in the 20th century. By doing so, she helped elevate women to a more equal status, and she encouraged others to continue to do so and challenge unfounded claims that were meant to suppress women. However, Leta didn’t just lead a movement in the field of women’s psychology.
While administering intelligence tests at the Clearing House, Leta developed an interest in the study of gifted children. To clarify, a “gifted” child is considered to have an IQ score above 130. At the time, it was assumed that gifted children didn’t need much help in school because they could handle themselves. As a result, many of these gifted students were left on their own and largely ignored, while other students were given more attention. However, just because a child is gifted does not mean that the child should receive less attention from their teachers. School encourages development both cognitively and socially, and gifted children, without their own individualized attention like everyone else, would not be able to reach their full potential. Leta therefore became the first psychologist to develop a unique curriculum for these children, fostering their development and “a more balanced and meaningful education” (“Leta Stetter Hollingworth,” 2018). In addition to developing this curriculum, Leta also taught one of the first courses on educating gifted children.
Before her death on November 27, 1939, Leta Stetter Hollingworth wrote several groundbreaking books, including Functional Periodicity (1914), which analyzed the mental and motor functions of women during menstruation; Gifted Children: Their Nature and Nurture (1926), which was the first comprehensive book about gifted kids; and Children Above IQ 180 (1942), which was one of the first systematic studies of children with an IQ above 180. You may notice that the last book was published after her date of death. This is because Leta unfortunately died while writing the book, requiring her husband to finish and publish it after she had passed. Although she lived a relatively short life of only 53 years, Leta Stetter Hollingworth helped to uproot the prejudices that plagued science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She made significant ground as an educator, a psychologist, and a feminist, and few challenged these prejudices as boldly as she did (Shields, 1990).
by Margaret Jones
References
Hollingworth, L. S. “Variability as Related to Sex Differences in Achievement: A Critique.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 19, no. 4, Jan. 1914, pp. 510–530., doi:10.1086/212287.
Hollingworth, L. S. (1914). Functional periodicity; an experimental study of the mental and motor abilities of women during menstruation. Teacher’s College, Columbia University: New York.
Hollingworth, L. S. (1916). Social devices for impelling women to bear and rear children. American Journal of Sociology 22: 19–29
Hollingworth, L. S. (1927). The new woman in the making. Current History 27 (1927): 20.
Hollingworth, L. S. (1928). The psychology of the adolescent. Appleton.
“Leta Stetter Hollingsworth.” National Women’s History Museum, www.womenshistory.org/leta-stetter-hollingsworth.
New World Encyclopedia contributors. Leta Stetter Hollingworth, New World Encyclopedia, 28 June 2018, 22:48 UTC, www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Leta_Stetter_Hollingworth&oldid=1012715.
Plucker, Jonathon. “Human Intelligence: Leta Stetter Hollingworth.” Leta Stetter Hollingworth, Human Intelligence, 2016, www.intelltheory.com/lhollingworth.shtml.
Sheilds, Stephanie A. “Ms. Pilgrim’s Progress and Commentary.” Roeper Review, vol. 12, no. 3, Mar. 1990, p. 151. Academic Search Complete, doi:10.1080/02783199009553260.
Silverman, L. K. (1992). Leta Stetter Hollingworth: Champion of the psychology of women and gifted children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 84(1), 20–27. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.84.1.20
