Leta Stetter Hollingworth

Leta Stetter Hollingworth (May 25, 1886 – November 27, 1939) was an American psychologist, educator, and feminist. She made contributions in psychology of women, clinical psychology, and educational psychology. She is best known for her work with gifted children.

Early life On May 25, 1886, Leta Anna Stetter was born in Dawes County, Nebraska near the town of Chadron. She was the first of three children born to Margaret Elinor Danley (1862–1890) and John George Stetter (1856–1943).

School was her only refuge from this abusive home life. Leta described her early education as a one-room school house where she received excellent individualized learning. Leta then attended Valentine High School, where she excelled in the classroom and discovered her talent and passion for writing. Her overall intelligence, wit, and humor were made evident when she was hired at age fifteen to write. She wrote weekly columns in the town newspaper, The Valentine Democrat. She left home in 1902, when she graduated from Valentine High School. She originally studied literature and writing, as she aspired to be a writer. However, her series of short stories were never published due to her being female. She was the literary editor of The Daily Nebraskan, associate editor of The Sombrero, and assistant editor of The Senior Book.

During her time at the University of Nebraska, she met and became engaged to Harry Hollingworth; the two would wed on December 31, 1908. Harry Hollingworth moved to New York to do graduate work at Columbia University and completed his doctorate under James Cattell. Stetter stayed behind in Nebraska to finish her undergraduate studies. She graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1906, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree, along with a State Teacher's Certificate. This qualified her to teach English Language and Literature in any Nebraska public high school. When he obtained an assistant professorship at Barnard College, Harry was able to afford to move Leta to New York with him. Harry hired Leta as his research assistant, and she was able to obtain enough money to attend graduate school at Columbia University and the Teachers College.

Interests in clinical psychology After receiving her M.Ed., she began part-time work at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives. It was her job to administer Binet intelligence tests. She had to teach herself how to administer them due to a lack of experience. The Civil Service began to supervise the administration of the tests in 1914, and demanded that examiners take competitive exams to determine their capability. Leta Hollingworth scored well and filled the position as the first psychologist under Civil Service in New York. Much of her work was conducted at the same time as Terman's and although the two never met, they had great respect for each other. Hollingworth was able to work past all of these concerns and conducted research that benefited science while maintaining participant privacy at the same time. She laid the foundations for future studies of gifted children with this work.

Hollingworth's publications were systematically presented in The Psychology of Subnormal Children (1920) and in Special Talents and Defects (1923) (Poffenberger 1940). Forty-five out of the seventy-five articles published by Hollingworth were about the subject of the superior child (Poffenberger 1940). Even throughout her work with gifted children, Hollingworth was conscientious about considering her results in a social context. She concludes her 1925 article "Vocabulary as a Symptom of Intellect" by stating: "A summary of present knowledge, derived from experimentation, would therefore state that an individual's vocabulary is one of the most significant symptoms of his 'inherent power to learn how to accomplish or how to obtain what she wants.' This does not, of course, imply that from the quality of a person's vocabulary it is possible to predict his future success in life. 'Success in life' depends upon strong determinants besides intelligence" (Hollingworth 1925, pg. 158). It is noteworthy that she considered the implications of her findings in a perspective larger than a psychological article.

Interest in the psychology of women While studying at Colombia, Leta Stetter Hollingworth became interested in the misconceptions about women that seemed to be a part of the zeitgeist. Thorndike agreed to supervise her dissertation on functional periodicity, which focused on the idea that women are psychologically impaired during menstruation. Thorndike greatly influenced the work of Leta Hollingworth as he was a supporter of the variability hypothesis. The variability hypothesis postulated that, because men exhibit a greater variation in both psychological and physical traits than women, women were destined for mediocrity while men both occupied the highest and lowest ends of the range on any given trait (Shields 1982). Hollingworth set out to prove that the variability hypothesis was incorrect and that the extremes were not based on a male genetic superiority, instead extremes were culturally-based. She believed that rather than innate differences, societal roles accounted for the sex differences in the numbers of institutionalized males and females at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives. Although the research of Hollingworth conflicted with the direct interests of Thorndike, she completed her doctorate dissertation beneath his supervision. Her dissertation addressed the previously supported concept of women's mental incapacity during their monthly menstruations. For the study, she recorded the results of both women's and men's performances on a variety of cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks daily for three months. No empirical evidence of a decreased performance with a phase of the menstrual cycle was found. Upon receiving her Ph.D. in 1916, Leta Stetter Hollingworth accepted Thorndike's offer of a position at the Columbia Teachers College.

In order to test the hypothesis that women were significantly impaired during their menstrual cycle, she tested twenty-three females and two males (as controls) by giving them tasks, which involved perceptual and motor skills and mental abilities over a three-month period. She concluded that her data did, "not reveal a periodic mental or motor inefficiency in normal women."

Hollingworth was also interested in challenging the widely accepted belief that intelligence is widely inherited and that women were intellectually inferior to men. She believed that women do not reach positions of prominence due to the social roles that are assigned to them, not because they are intellectually inferior to men.

An assertion held at the time was that there was greater variability among men while women were less variable. Hollingworth referred to this variability hypothesis as "armchair dogma" which she characterized as the "literature of opinion". This differs, she maintained, from the "literature of fact" which has been carefully obtained through controlled scientific data because it is merely statements made by scientific men not based on experimental evidence. Hollingworth states in her article, "Variability as Related to Sex Differences in Achievement: A Critique", "Undoubtedly one of the most difficult and fundamental problems that today confront thinking women is how to secure for themselves the chance to vary from the mode of their sex, and at the same time to procreate, in a social order that has been built up on the assumption that there are little or no variations in tastes, interests, and abilities within the female sex. It is a problem that has never confronted me." In order to further her research on the "inherently more variable male hypothesis", Hollingworth performed another experiment in which she used infants because they have not yet been influenced by the environmental conditions that could account for variability differences in adults. These environmental conditions would provide the adult male with many more opportunities to be more variable than females. Men had a wide range of professions from which to choose that would improve the talents they possessed. Women, on the other hand, had been confined to only one profession, housekeeping, which did not provide them the chance to prove their intelligence. Thus, their natural variability would be impaired. Hollingworth and Helen Montague collected data on 1,000 consecutively born males and 1,000 consecutively born females in the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. They took ten anatomical measurements on each infant and found that on the whole the male infants were slightly larger than the females, but there were no differences in variability between the sexes. "For the first time a serious crack had appeared in the armor of the variability hypothesis".

Hollingworth believed that she was mostly responsible for Thorndike's revised beliefs on the importance of nurture over nature. She also was responsible for Terman modifying his nativistic position concerning gender differences in intelligence testing. This was because Hollingworth showed that more men were classified as gifted due to social factors.

Death and legacy Leta Hollingworth died on November 27, 1939, at the age of 53 of abdominal cancer at the Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan.

Hollingsworth's contributions to eugenics in American education were pivotal to the foundation and dissemination of gifted and talented programs.

She is known for her dedication to her research participants. She stressed the importance of direct contact with her participants, even when her peers in the testing profession did not. She famously said, "The adding machine has tremendous advantages over the child as an object of intimate association. It has no parents; it does not lose its pocket-handkerchief; it does not kick or yell. All this we grant. Those who really study children — those who would study any individuals— must be prepared to take pains". She is also known for her work in the first two decades of the twentieth century that contributed in a small way to changing the views toward women that led to women having the right to vote in a nation that had too long denied them that right. The Hollingworth Award was sponsored by Intertel and the Intertel Foundation for over twenty years. Additional co-sponsorship by the National Association for Gifted Children was obtained since the late 90s, to which the award had been turned over circa 2001, and which has continued awarding it yearly since.