Leta Stetter Hollingworth (May 25, 1886 – November 27, 1939) was an American psychologist, educator, and feminist. She made contributions in psychology of women, clinical psychology, and educational psychology. She is best known for her work with gifted children.Hochman, S. K. "Leta Stetter Hollingworth." Webster University. Retrieved from
Early life On May 25, 1886, Leta Anna Stetter was born in Dawes County, Nebraska near the town of Chadron. She was the first of three children born to Margaret Elinor Danley (1862–1890) and John George Stetter (1856–1943).
Her childhood consisted of multiple hardships. At three years old, her mother died after giving birth to her third child, and her father deserted the family. Leta and her sisters were then raised by their maternal grandparents — Samuel Thomas Danley (1833–1898) and Mary (1838–1904) — on their farm. After ten years of absence, Leta's father remarried and forced the children to leave their grandparents and move to Valentine, Nebraska, to live with him and their stepmother. Leta described the experience of living there as a "fiery furnace" due, in part, to the alcoholism that plagued the household and the verbal and emotional abuse inflicted upon the children by their stepmother.Klein, A. G. (2002). A forgotten voice: A biography of Leta Stetter Hollingworth. Scottsdale, AZ: Great Potential Press Inc.
School was her only refuge from this abusive home life. Leta described her early education as a one-room school house where she received excellent individualized learning. Leta then attended Valentine High School, where she excelled in the classroom and discovered her talent and passion for writing. Her overall intelligence, wit, and humor were made evident when she was hired at age fifteen to write. She wrote weekly columns in the town newspaper, The Valentine Democrat. She left home in 1902, when she graduated from Valentine High School.
College At age 16, she enrolled at the University of Nebraska. She originally studied literature and writing, as she aspired to be a writer. However, her series of short stories were never published due to her being female. She was the literary editor of The Daily Nebraskan, associate editor of The Sombrero, and assistant editor of The Senior Book.Silverman, L.K. (1992). Leta Stetter Hollingworth: Champion of the psychology of women and gifted children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 84, 20–27.
During her time at the University of Nebraska, she met and became engaged to Harry Hollingworth; the two would wed on December 31, 1908. Harry Hollingworth moved to New York to do graduate work at Columbia University and completed his doctorate under James Cattell. Stetter stayed behind in Nebraska to finish her undergraduate studies. She graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1906, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree, along with a State Teacher's Certificate.Schultz, D.P., & Schultz, S.E. (2012). A History of modern psychology (10th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning This qualified her to teach English Language and Literature in any Nebraska public high school.
Early career and marriage Leta started her professional career as a teacher at two high schools in Nebraska. The first of these was in DeWitt, Nebraska, Harry Hollingworth's hometown. She was the assistant principal of the high school for one year. Her second teaching position, which lasted for two years, was in the town of McCook. She flourished at these jobs before moving to New York, where her fiancé was finishing up his doctorate under Cattell.Benjamin, Ludy T.(2007). A Brief History of Modern Psychology. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. When he obtained an assistant professorship at Barnard College, Harry was able to afford to move Leta to New York with him. They were married on December 31, 1908.
Leta Hollingworth intended on teaching in New York, but soon discovered that the city had a policy stating that married women were not allowed to teach. She continued writing and busied herself with housework, yet this proved to be unrewarding and she found herself bored, frustrated, and beginning to develop depression. It was difficult to bear the fact that, despite her training, she was unable to contribute financially. She tried to go on to graduate school but was barred due to gender discrimination at the time. She began to question the role society expected of women and the inequality of women's opportunities. As a result, her career interests changed to education and sociology.
Her luck turned around in 1911, when Harry was offered a position in Coca Cola to conduct a study on caffeine.Klein, 2000 Harry hired Leta as his research assistant, and she was able to obtain enough money to attend graduate school at Columbia University and the Teachers College. In 1913, she received her master's degree in education at Columbia and began working for the Clearing House for Mental Defectives to administer Binet intelligence tests in 1914. She quickly became the top scorer, and New York City's first civil service psychologist while filling a post at Bellevue Hospital as chief of the psychological lab. Hollingworth continued on her academic journey to study educational psychology under the supervision of Edward L. Thorndike. During this decade Leta also fought for women's suffrage and belonged to the progressive era group the Feminist Alliance.
Interests in clinical psychology After receiving her M.Ed., she began part-time work at the Clearing House for Mental Defectives. It was her job to administer Binet intelligence tests. She had to teach herself how to administer them due to a lack of experience. The Civil Service began to supervise the administration of the tests in 1914, and demanded that examiners take competitive exams to determine their capability. Leta Hollingworth scored well and filled the position as the first psychologist under Civil Service in New York.
From there, she went on to work at the Bellevue Hospital Center. She was offered the position of chief at the psychological lab. She completed her doctoral work at Columbia under Edward L. Thorndike, while maintaining the position of consulting psychologist for the New York Police Department. In 1916 she received her Ph.D. and was promptly offered a teaching position at Columbia Teacher's College. She remained there for the rest of her life.
Although Hollingworth began teaching, she continued to devote at least one day out of the week to work at Bellevue Hospital. There she helped establish the Classification Clinic for Adolescents, as well as the American Association of Clinical Psychologists. She was involved in developing the ethical guidelines for clinical psychology and in promoting universal standards for training in clinical psychology. Along with her teaching duties, she also trained clinical psychologists and was the principal of the School of Exceptional Children at Bellevue.
Intelligence testing, mental defects and exceptional children In the 1920s, Hollingworth's interests shifted to the study of children, especially those with mental gifts. Due to the efforts of Lewis Madison Terman and his associates, intelligence testing and ability grouping had made their way into public schools as common practices by the 1930s. Terman believed that such intelligence testing was crucial for identifying gifted individuals so that they would receive special attention, be helped to reach their full potential, and become strong members of society. He believed that democracy would benefit from differentiating between the educational experiences of these gifted individuals and the educational experiences of non-gifted individuals. Although he believed strongly in these ideas, Terman spent little time making concrete suggestions to change school curriculums in order to meet the specific needs of gifted children.
Leta Stetter Hollingworth, however, was active in developing educational strategies concerning the development of gifted students.Hergenhahn, p. 321 Much of her work was conducted at the same time as Terman's and although the two never met, they had great respect for each other. Even though many of their views overlapped, the two did disagree on a major point. Terman believed that intelligence was an inheritable trait, and focused only on defining and describing it. While Hollingworth acknowledged the role of inheritance, she also believed that environmental and educational factors had an effect on intelligence's potential. As a result of this belief, she was more interested in how to properly nurture gifted children and their education.
Her work of administering Binet intelligence tests at the Clearing House primed her for work with the gifted and the mentally challenged alike. She learned through working with children labelled as "mentally defective" that many of them actually had normal intelligence, but suffered from adjustment problems during adolescence. From this discovery she began to focus more on this population. She published several books on the topic: The Psychology of Subnormal Children (1920), Special Talents and Defects (1923) and The Psychology of the Adolescent (1928).
The last of these became a leading textbook for the following two decades, replacing one written by G. Stanley Hall. Several magazines noted the importance of the book and published excerpts from the chapter, "Psychology Weaning." The book gives several examples of successful completion of this psychological process, in order to guide puzzled parents and aid them with their children. She describes it as similar to the "physical weaning from infantile methods of taking food, it may be attended by emotional outbursts or depressions, which are likely to come upon people whenever habits have to be broken." Additional writing done on children with mental defects can be found in her books, The Problem of Mental Disorder (1934) and in Psychology of Special Disability in Spelling (1918). She even wrote her own textbooks for the classes she taught at Columbia.
It was not until the 1920s that she began to earnestly work with gifted children. She is known for coining the term “gifted” even though she primarily began her work with the “mentally defective”. Hollingworth believed that there were certain ways to nurture giftedness and educate gifted children. “Gifted Children”, written by Hollingworth in 1926, describes the results of her study in an attempt to quantify the family backgrounds, psychological composition, and temperamental, social, and physical traits of gifted children. It also includes her attempt to create a curriculum to benefit young children with IQs over 155.
The last of her publications was “Children Above 180 IQ” in 1942, which was actually completed by her husband after her death, and which observed how many children with such high IQs often had adjustment problems that seemed to arise from both a lack of intellectual stimulation and a general parental neglect. Proper resources and educational opportunities did not exist for them: the zeitgeist of the time was that, "the bright can take care of themselves." Hollingworth was able to devise a method of working with such individuals that stressed the importance of maintaining and keeping contact with them every day. They needed to be identified early in their lives as being gifted, as well as not kept isolated from other children and peers. Their needs were not being met by the average school systems, which needed to be addressed.