Transcendentalism In Psychology

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Psychology has become the study the mind and behavior of humans. Throughout time, psychology has taken the form in multiple disciplines from therapy, research, perception, experimental, abnormal, and much more. What psychology has become was originally started with the founding fathers of the field with their ideas, theories, and research. The majority of these founding fathers as I would call them, were men. They founded the field, they advanced the field, they were the field of psychology, but what about the women? As a senior in college, very little has been learned about the women within psychology and their contributions that they brought. Were women not interested in psychology, were they not allowed to study psychology, was psychology …show more content…

The organizers of the movement were not just angry about the prohibitions then existing against women speaking in public or being active in political organizations, there was a separation of domestic and nondomestic. The identification of women with the home and family could exist outside of civil society. Eleanor Flexner described it as married women suffered civil death, in which they have no rights to property and legal entity or existence away from their husbands (Nicholson, 1986). The women’s rights movement was gathering interest of men, one of them being Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom spoke on their behalf at the 1855 National Women’s Rights Convention in Boston. Emerson spoke of women as the educator of humanity, the care of her children, and civilizer of mankind. John Stuart Mill wrote The Subjection of Women (1869), arguing in favor of equality between sexes. Mill compares the position of women with slavery in which control by the male sex is based on chivalry and generosity, using bribery and intimidation instead of brutality to secure obedience, deference, and gratitude for protection. Bribery and intimidation effect women economically and morally by having them depend on men, law completes intimidation by discriminatory statues. Much like Wollstonecraft had argued 70 years’ prior, Stuart took cause for women’s education. He saw it as positive action to take in the direction of correcting the social subordination of women (Bohan,