Mary Whiton
Calkins
1863 — 1930
The Wellesley professor who passed Harvard's doctoral examination brilliantly, was refused the degree for being a woman, and declined the substitute.
A minister's daughter and a classicist, she was sent by Wellesley in 1890 to learn the new psychology, sat as an unofficial guest in William James's seminar when every other student had dropped it, and worked in Hugo Münsterberg's laboratory. She opened the first psychological laboratory at a women's college in 1891, invented the paired-associates method for studying memory, and in 1895 passed an examination her examiners called the most brilliant they had seen. Harvard refused the degree. In 1902 Radcliffe offered its own; she refused that. She was the first woman to preside over the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association.
She argued for forty years that psychology is the science of selves. The field went the other way, and has only lately come back to the question.