VII Reflection Paper

Student’s Name

Institutional Affiliation

Course Tittle

Professor’s Name

Date

Reflection on Mary Calkins Major Issues Facing Women

I imagine if I could be Mary Calkins to reflect on the major issues facing women/minorities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Being a pioneer, Mary Calkins broke obstacles for women in the area of psychology. She had quite a few writing comprehensively about women’s inequality, even further researching its outcomes. Being a psychologist at the period when women were deprived of the right to vote, she talked at a number of women’s suffrage conventions. According to her theory, she believed that the self ought to be the basic study in psychology. Mary Calkins disputed that the self is encompassed of a few different characteristics, including consciousness and uniqueness (Johnston & Johnson, 2018). Calkins felt that it was significant for psychologists to study the self’s connection to its environment. She is an extraordinary woman who attempted to bring gender equality and additional issues to the front.

Women and the minority faced and continue facing major issues in the 19th and 20th centuries. They are well-thought-out as a minority group since they do not share the similar privileges, power, opportunities, and rights as men. Although women have made significant advances in attaining access to education and employment, to this day, they continue to face great difficulties that men largely do not confront. For instance, at the time in which Mary Calkins was trying to get her education, she faced many setbacks since she was a woman. The experiences she got shaped many of her perceptions of women’s rights and made her somewhat of an advocate (Rutherford & Milar, 2017). It is significant to note that in recent studies, findings indicate that women go through racialized and gendered forms of sexual harassment that result in isolation and lead to exclusion from leadership opportunities. Women’s economic history illustrates how for centuries, gender has inscribed a continuing unfairness into the system of labor markets that political and civil rights have moderated but not eradicated.

The self-psychology theory of Mary Calkins, which discards Freudian philosophy of the role sexual drives play in the psyche structure, centers on the growth of empathy toward an individual in treatment and the exploration of important elements of growth and healthy development. Discrimination against women and the minority is evident in several different spheres of society. During the 19th century, women were prohibited from voting and were normally required to surrender control of their properties to their husbands upon marriage. Men and women were not equal during that period in a way that women were seen as the weaker sex. Today, women are subjected to high rates of gender-based violence and harassment, including intimate partner violence and sexual assault. Just like Calkins, I would oppose the area of differentiation to the right to vote on women. In 1902, Calkins and three other women who had finished studying at Harvard were not eligible for a degree based on their gender. However, they were recommended by Radcliffe and ratified by Harvard as candidates for the degree of Ph.D. from Radcliffe. Up to the current day, Harvard has not issued any degree in honor of Mary Calkins.

If I could be Mary Calkins, I could see the major issues facing women and address them the same way she did. For instance, women are going through inequalities in employment and earnings, gender bias in the distribution of education and health, ownership disparity, gender inequity in freedom expression, and gender disparity in respect of violence and victimization. Gender inequality destroys the psychological and physical wellbeing of millions of women and girls all over different places through the numerous tangible benefits it gives men through power, resources, authority, and control.

Reference

Johnston, E., & Johnson, A. (2018). Reimagining the history of the psychology of women.

https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0000059-001

Rutherford, A., & Milar, K. (2017). “The difference being a woman made” Untold Lives in personal and intellectual context.

https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.21860