Leta Hollingworth
American psychologist who tested claims about sex differences and studied gifted children
American psychologist at Columbia who tested claims that menstruation impairs women's mental performance and that men vary more than women. She then spent much of her career on gifted children.
Why this person matters
Hollingworth answered widely held claims about women with data, and argued that the evidence offered for greater male variability did not separate biology from social role. Her gifted-children work is still cited in education. She did this while married women were barred from teaching, which pushed her out of the classroom for about three years.
Main contributions
Testing functional periodicity
Her research tested the idea that women are mentally impaired during menstruation. Women and men were tested daily for three months on cognitive, perceptual and motor tasks, and she found no evidence linking reduced performance to menstrual phases.
Challenging the variability hypothesis
With Helen Montague she measured 1,000 male and 1,000 female newborns at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Males were slightly larger, but the sexes showed no male excess in variability. She argued that adult differences reflected social roles.
Gifted children
She is credited with coining the term 'gifted'. From 1922 she studied 50 children aged seven to nine with IQs above 155, reported in Gifted Children (1926). Her last book, Children Above 180 IQ (1942), was completed by her husband Harry Hollingworth after her death.
Context and limits
Her gifted-children work relied on IQ tests, and critics saw the enriched curriculum at the Speyer School as undemocratic. Psychology's Feminist Voices notes that her phrase 'socially undesirable deviates' suggested eugenic views, and her biographer Ann Klein reports that she favoured involuntary sterilisation of people judged mentally deficient. Sources differ slightly on the newborn study: one says no sex difference in variability, another that any difference favoured females.
In your introductory course
Thinking, language and intelligence.Appears in the intelligence and gender chapters as an early empirical reply to claims that women are less variable or less capable, and as a founder of gifted education.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 7.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1914
Worked at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives in New York.
- 1916
Received her PhD at Columbia University under E. L. Thorndike and joined Teachers College.
- 1922
Began her study of children with IQs above 155.
- 1926
Published Gifted Children.
- 1936
The Speyer School programme for gifted children was created.
Source
- Psychology's Feminist Voices, Leta HollingworthSociety or association. Institutional biography inspected.