This article examines the views of early developmental psychologist Florence Goodenough, summarizing her contributions to the field, her complex viewpoints on science and gender issues, and her arguments for maternal record-keeping as a valuable scientific strategy, as drawn from her writings in textbooks, popular magazine articles, and private correspondence. During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, when Goodenough enjoyed a high professional profile as a research scientist, the field of child psychology shifted from focus on producing applied knowledge to benefit parents and educators to a preference for laboratory-controlled basic science approaches to understanding development. Goodenough championed observation and other descriptive methods, including use of mothers as data collectors in the home, even while these approaches were increasingly discredited by prominent peers in the United States. I argue that Goodenough's allegiance to maternal record-keeping highlights a forgotten strand of context-sensitive, descriptive work that survived despite its general disparagement among proponents of a narrower version of strictly experimental developmental science emerging in the 1920s.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Elizabeth Johnston;
Ann Johnson;
(2017)
Balancing Life and Work by Unbending Gender: Early American Women Psychologists’ Struggles and Contributions
(/isis/citation/CBB668336940/)
Thesis
Menefee, Joan Kuulei;
(2005)
Decoding Distraction: Attention in American Culture, 1871--1916
(/isis/citation/CBB001561888/)
Article
Beatty, Barbara;
(2009)
Transitory Connections: The Reception and Rejection of Jean Piaget's Psychology in the Nursery School Movement in the 1920s and 1930s
(/isis/citation/CBB001231180/)
Article
Johnson, Ann;
Johnston, Elizabeth;
(2015)
Up the Years with the Bettersons: Gender and Parent Education in Interwar America
(/isis/citation/CBB001552616/)
Article
Johnston, Elizabeth;
Johnson, Ann;
(2008)
Searching for the Second Generation of American Women Psychologists
(/isis/citation/CBB000774625/)
Article
Benjamin, Ludy T., Jr.;
Henry, Keisha D.;
McMahon, Lance R.;
(2005)
Inez Beverly Prosser and the Education of African Americans
(/isis/citation/CBB000671007/)
Article
Andrick, John M.;
(2012)
Deslartean Hypnosis for Girls' Bodies and Minds: Annie Payson Call and the Lasell Seminary Nerve
(/isis/citation/CBB001210163/)
Article
Bromley, Elizabeth;
(2006)
Stimulating a Normal Adjustment: Misbehavior, Amphetamines, and the Electroencephalogram at the Bradley Home for Children
(/isis/citation/CBB000671321/)
Article
Simonton, Dean Keith;
(2010)
Research Notes: The Curious Case of Catharine Cox (Miles): The 1926 Dissertation and Her Miles-Wolfe (1936) Follow-Up
(/isis/citation/CBB001033697/)
Article
Varga, Donna;
(2011)
Look--Normal: The Colonized Child of Developmental Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001033717/)
Book
Paula S. Fass;
(2016)
The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child
(/isis/citation/CBB549676635/)
Essay Review
Herman, Ellen;
(2001)
How Children Turn Out and How Psychology Turns Them Out
(/isis/citation/CBB000100117/)
Book
Gianluca Giachery;
(2023)
Il medico e il bambino. Ricostruzione storica e genealogia pedagogica in uno studio di fine Ottocento sull'isterismo infantile
(/isis/citation/CBB079957382/)
Thesis
Wentworth, Phyllis Ann;
(2002)
Child welfare reformers, academic psychologists, and the dependent child in Progressive Era America
(/isis/citation/CBB001562541/)
Thesis
Garrison, Joshua B.;
(2006)
Ontogeny Recapitulates Savagery: The Evolution of G. Stanley Hall's Adolescent
(/isis/citation/CBB001560588/)
Article
Fridlund, Alan J.;
Beck, Hall P.;
Goldie, William D.;
Irons, Gary;
(2012)
Little Albert: A Neurologically Impaired Child
(/isis/citation/CBB001211117/)
Chapter
Thurschwell, Pam;
(2012)
Freud's Stepchild: Adolescent Subjectivity and Psychoanalysis
(/isis/citation/CBB001201494/)
Article
Andrea Graus;
(2021)
Child prodigies in Paris in the belle époque: Between child stars and psychological subjects
(/isis/citation/CBB328653193/)
Book
Deborah Blythe Doroshow;
(2019)
Emotionally Disturbed: A History of Caring for America's Troubled Children
(/isis/citation/CBB495157182/)
Article
Molina, Andrés Ríos;
(2013)
“Dictating the Suitable Way of Life”: Mental Hygiene for Children and Workers in Socialist Mexico, 1934--1940
(/isis/citation/CBB001213777/)
Be the first to comment!