Margaret Washburn, the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in psychology, was born on July 25th in Harlem in New York City to parents who strongly encouraged intellectual pursuits.  After graduating high school she began her education at Vassar College at 15 years old.  James McKeen Cattell guided her graduate work at Columbia where she attended as an auditor since the college did not yet admit women into its graduate programs.  He encouraged her to transfer to Cornell where she would be eligible to earn a degree and where she would study with E.B. Titchener.  She never married choosing career instead, but she had a wide variety of interests outside of academics including ballroom dancing, playing the piano, painting as well as a terrific love of animals. Washburn suffered an incapacitating stroke in 1937 and died two years later.

To learn more about Titchener's school of thought see "Timeline of Schools of Thought" at http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/schools_of_thought.htm#structuralism

Contributions

Washburn spent her career teaching at Vassar where she published 134 articles and 66 book reviews/notices.  She was instrumental in the maturation of psychological endeavors as a scholarly and scientific endeavor.  Her most commonly known publication, The Animal Mind, became the first textbook in comparative psychology that compiled the experimental studies of animal behavior and mentality.  Washburn maintained that psychology is about studying both behavior and consciousness and research should both describe and explain by obtaining and interpreting facts.  Professionally, she held several important positions throughout her career including APA president in 1921, member of he APA council, psychology representative to the National Research Council Division of Psychology and Anthropology along with many others.  Her most notable achievement, however, was the election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1932 and in 1903 she was ranked in the top 50 psychologists.

Karen Danielsen (Horney) was born on September 15 in a suburb of Hamburg, Germany to her 50 year old  sea captain father and his second wife.  Her father did not believe in extended education for women, but her mother was impressed with her initial abilities so encouraged her. In the beginning, she decided to study medicine; however, her father refused both to permit her to go and also to pay the tuition.  In the end, extended as well as immediate family pressure forced him to change his mind, and Karen was allowed to attend.  While she was there, her mother left her father, but never divorced him.

In the middle of her studies, she married,  had three daughters, and lost both of her parents. 

Contributions

Horney is most notable as a pioneering theorist in personality and feminist psychology, and, as contrary as it may seem, she used Freudian thought although their views differed substantially in many ways, so, eventually, he began to refute and denigrate her work.  While in Germany, Horney wrote 14 papers developing a feminine psychology that provided a new way to think about women. She immigrated to America where she become an assistant at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis for two years before she moved to New York to teach, write, and train new analysts.  After moving to the states, she began to develop personality theories based on cultural and interpersonal factors with hints of adjusted psychoanalytic twists.  For example, she desexualized the Oedipal complex, and she explored the role that conflicting cultural expectations play in anxiety.  She is often the only woman whose theory is included in personality textbooks.

She was a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, the American Institute of Psychoanalysis, and the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

She was brilliant and remarkable.  She died of cancer in 1952, and The Karen Horney Clinic was opened in 1955 in New York City.