What Were Margaret Floy Washburn’s Contributions to Psychology?

Around the turn of the twentieth century, there wasn’t much space in academia for female scholars. Certain disciplines, like psychology, were almost exclusively male. Graduate programs didn’t permit women to enroll, and there were few opportunities for women to study psychology and impact the field with their ideas.

Margaret Floy Washburn was one of the few women who was able to fight her way into the field. Many psychologists now consider her one of the founding scholars of comparative psychology — and some historians argue she should be better remembered. 

Margaret Floy Washburn was an American psychologist born in 1871 who earned her doctorate in psychology despite having to begin her doctoral studies as a “hearer,” meaning an unofficial student-at-large.

“She was a woman, a scientist working at a time when that was viewed as incompatible by the larger culture,” says Dorothy M. Fragaszy, the Emerita professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. 

Washburn was born in Harlem, New York City, on her family’s farm, where her great-grandfather had started commercial gardens. She was an only child, and her parents placed her in small private schools where she sped her way through her elementary studies and started high school at age 12. She began Vassar College at age 15 and graduated in 1891.

Her interest in psychology led her to Columbia University, where a psychology laboratory had just been established. The school, however, refused to admit her as a graduate student, and she later wrote: “... the most I could hope for was to be tolerated as a ‘hearer.’”

She soon learned of a new doctoral program opening at Cornell University. She attended on a scholarship and had exposure to experimental psychology. She graduated in 1894 and took positions at several universities before she landed back at Vassar College in 1903, this time as a professor. 

As a scholar, Washburn pursued research and publishing despite her limited laboratory. Vassar College was not a graduate-degree granting institution, which meant Washburn didn’t have the benefit of working long-term with graduate students, Fragaszy says.

Washburn used professional journals to establish herself within the discipline and even served as the president of the American Psychological Association. “For about 30 years, she was editor, associate editor, co-editor – you name the journal of psychology published in the U.S. – and she was an editor,” Fragaszy says. “This was enormous professional service.”

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Although her laboratory was more limited than her peers at larger universities, Washburn published extensively and has been called comparative psychology’s founding mother.  

One of her textbooks, Fragaszy says, was published in the early 1900s and used widely in the U.S. until the 1960s. 

Comparative psychology is the study of behavioral differences between two groups. Initially, comparative psychologists were interested in studying humans and their differences from non-human species. A comparative psychologist, for example, might seek to understand a behavioral difference (or similarity) between humans and gorillas.

Over time, the study broadened to include an analysis between distinctions among the same species. A comparative psychologist, for example, might study the behavior of different generations. In the U.S., the discipline became increasingly popular around the turn of the twentieth century. 

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In 1908, Washburn published The Animal Mind — a book that examined the behavior of animals. She went beyond just observing rats in her laboratory and conducted experiments that allowed her to report on the behavior of a wide variety of insects, birds, and sea life.

The book, as one biographer described it, “was met with wide and lasting popularity.” It was reprinted four times in the next three decades. Part of the popularity was Washburn’s unique but scientific approach. Other textbook authors relied on anecdotes and observations, but Washburn based her results on clinical observations.

Washburn felt a researcher had to have foundational knowledge about the animal in question in order to properly record its behavior. She argued that behaviors like fright, hunger, or loneliness could complicate results, so they had to be known in advance so the researcher could identify them. 

For almost 60 years, The Animal Mind was on the reading list for undergraduate courses in psychology. Although it is no longer a teaching tool, the book is considered an important historical document in the history of the discipline, Fragaszy says.

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Washburn suffered a stroke in March of 1939 and died later that year on an October afternoon. Academic psychology journals ran biographies after her death, detailing her life’s work and her contributions to the discipline. 

More than 80 years have passed since her death, and many psychology undergraduates may not be familiar with her work. Fragaszy says there are many reasons younger scholars are unfamiliar with Washburn, including that limited laboratory she had at Vassar. 

“She didn’t have a cadre of Ph.D. apprentices carrying on her work,” Fragaszy says.  

Washburn’s male contemporaries at larger universities had the benefit of working with graduate students, and because graduate studies can take several years to complete, they were able to work together on larger, empirical studies that not only received greater attention but also served as the foundation for which that graduate student launched their own career. 

“Her own theoretical contributions have not received the attention they did. It seems to me that she was ahead of her time in some way,” Fragaszy says.

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Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

• Psychology’s Feminist Voices. Margaret Floy Washburn

• Emerita professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. Dorothy M. Fragaszy

• National Academy of Sciences. Margaret Floy Washburn

• APA Psych Net. Comparative psychology’s founding mother, Margaret Floy Washburn

• Frontiers in psychology. The origin of the phrase comparative psychology: an historical overview

• The American Journal of Psychology. The Psychological Contributions of Margaret Floy Washburn

• New World Encyclopedia. Margaret Floy Washburn

Emilie Lucchesi has written for some of the country's largest newspapers, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an MA from DePaul University. She also holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois-Chicago with an emphasis on media framing, message construction and stigma communication. Emilie has authored three nonfiction books. Her third, "A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy," releases October 3, 2023 from Chicago Review Press and is co-authored with survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin.