Mother of Behaviorism

I was fascinated to read about Mary Cover Jones this past week in our textbook.  It was the first time that a female has been mentioned as making great contributions to psychology, so I decided to look further into her career.

Mary Cover Jones graduated from Vassar in 1919.  She completed her graduate work at Columbia and then held a variety of research positions.  In one such position, she was tasked to follow 200 fifth and sixth grade students through puberty and adolescents.  She actually ended up following some of the students through middle and late adulthood.  With the data she collected, she was able to publish results on a wide variety of topics including the long-term psychological and behavioral effects of late and early physical maturation in adolescence.  Another study she published from this same group was exploring the developmental antecedents of alcohol abuse.  She ended up publishing over 100 studies from data obtained from this original group of 5^th and 6^th graders.  She was coined the “mother of behavior therapy” by Joseph Walpole.

Even though Jones began as a strict behaviorist, she evolved into a psychologist with an eclectic bag of tricks and including a holistic view of people she was studying.  Late in her career, at a behavior conference, she made the following quote about her body of work:

[M]y last 45 years have been spent in longitudinal research in which I have watched the psychobiological development of our study members as they grew from children to adults now in their fifties… My association with this study has broadened my conception of the human experience.  Now I would be less satisfied to treat the fears of a 3-year-old, or of anyone else, without a later follow-up and in isolation from an appreciation of him as a tantalizingly complex person with unique potentials for stability and change

Despite all of her professional achievements, she had some setbacks in her life.  For instance, she was not allowed to use her study of Peter and the rabbit (her now most famous case) as her dissertation because her sample size (1) was too small.  As a result, her work on desensitizing Peter, would not become very well known until the 1960’s.  She was also married to a prominent psychologist (Harold Jones) and was not allowed to become a professor of psychology at Berkeley because her husband already worked in that department.  Instead, she had to settle for an assistant professor position in education.

Overall, I feel that she was a fascinating woman with a long career in a male dominated field in an era when not many women were encouraged to work and think for themselves.  Her work has stood the test of time and made her immortal.  At the end of her life, before she died (at almost 91 years old), she told her sister: “I am still learning about what is important in life.”