Mary Whiton Calkins 1863 – 1930

Mary Whiton Calkins was an American philosopher and psychologist and the first woman elected president of both the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association. She completed all the requirements for the Harvard doctorate under William James and Josiah Royce in 1895, but the Harvard Corporation refused to grant the degree to a woman. She taught for forty years at Wellesley College and developed a system of personalist idealism in which the self is the most fundamental category of philosophy. Her textbook An Introduction to Psychology introduced the field to a generation of students.