Women on the River of Life

A Fifty-Year Study of Adult Development

Ravenna M Helson, Valory Mitchell

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520971011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Commenced in 1958 with 142 young women who were seniors at Mills College, the Mills Study has become the largest and longest longitudinal study of women's adult development, with assessments of these women in their twenties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. Women on the River of Life synthesizes five decades of research to paint a picture of women's personality and development across the lifespan. The book explores questions of family, work, life-path, maturity, wisdom, creativity, attachment, and purpose in life, unfolding in the context of a rapidly changing historical period with far-reaching consequences for the kinds of lives women would envision for themselves. Helson and Mitchell breathe life into abstract theories and concepts with the real-life stories and voices of the study's participants. Woven throughout the book are the authors' reminiscences on the profound endeavor of sustaining a longitudinal study of women's lives through time.

1

How the Mills Study Came About

There was a serendipitous confluence of factors that led to the Mills study: the founding of the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at the University of California, Berkeley, which became home to the Mills study, housing and nurturing it for over fifty years. Then there was the arrival of Ravenna Helson at UC Berkeley.

We describe the work done at the institute, and experiences and people central in shaping Ravenna’s work. The concept of creativity was a new and exciting frontier in psychology, and the time was right to study women’s creative potential. We present the launch of the Mills study with the age-21 assessment and the age-27 followup. In the next chapter, we will turn to the phase, some twenty years later, when the Mills study would change from a study of women’s creative potential to a study of adult development, and when Valory Mitchell joined the project.

The remainder of this chapter is authored by Ravenna, and tells her personal story.

• • •

Let’s start with 1949, the year I went to the University of California, Berkeley for a Ph.D. This was also the year that the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) was founded, and the year of the loyalty oath crisis.

Three years after the end of the Second World War, the GI bill had provided many veterans with funds to go to college, and psychology had shown its practical value during the war. As a result, the size of the psychology department more than doubled. Yet there were still only two women on the faculty, one very elderly and teaching only a course in her esoteric specialty. There was no “psychology of women” or “gender studies” taught anywhere at the university.

In some ways, the period following the end of the Second World War was an expansive time of constructive change. More staff were needed to train students in the new profession of clinical psychology, and more students came to get started in that field.

It seemed very strange to me that, at a prominent and progressive university like Cal, the Regents should be asking the faculty to sign a loyalty oath swearing that they did not support the Communist Party. What I did not sufficiently appreciate was that Senator Joseph McCarthy was leading a campaign of intolerance fueled by anxious and vigilant fears of communism, ruining people’s lives and careers by accusing them of communist sympathies. This witch-hunt came to the University in 1949, when the University’s state lobbyist came up with the idea of instigating a loyalty oath that all UC employees must sign in order to be paid. The esteemed professor with whom I had come to UC to work, Dr. Edward Tolman, would resign from teaching in order to lead a campaign of the faculty against signing this oath. The 1950s were considered the Age of Conformity, but in the case of the loyalty oath, this push for conformity clearly infringed on individuals’ private beliefs and employment opportunities.

I never felt ignored, discriminated against or mistreated as one of the few female students at Cal, except once. In those days a committee of faculty decided which students to recommend for which job openings upon their graduation. I was chagrined when a secretary in the graduate dean’s office told me that the faculty usually recommended women students for women’s colleges, and so I had received a recommendation for a job at Smith College. As it turned out, Smith proved to be a great fit. The faculty was mixed-gender, doing good work, and respectful of each other. It was an excellent environment for a shy introvert just starting out, and I also found my husband, Henry Helson, who was teaching mathematics at nearby Yale! After I married Henry in 1952 I continued to teach at Smith half the week but lived the other half in New Haven with Henry. There, I saw the low status of women in the world of mathematics. Women and their ideas were ignored. At dinner parties, for example, men did all of the talking.

THE INSTITUTE OF PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT AND RESEARCH (IPAR)

Henry Murray, one of the founders of the field of personality within psychology in the 1930s, was a major influence on the development of IPAR. He was a professor at Harvard, where both Don MacKinnon (who would become IPAR’s founder) and Nevitt Sanford (who would become an IPAR staff member) were his students. Murray was a psychologist of the imagination and a major influence on the values at IPAR. He had started the “personological tradition” at Harvard, putting the person at the center of investigation and studying people and their motives rather than particular traits. This tradition included the study of literature and myth. IPAR adopted this personological tradition, and the study of the whole person, which involved a commitment to obtaining a lot of information in a variety of ways.

Studying Personality

New survey and personality assessment techniques had been developed for use in the war effort. Don MacKinnon had been chief of Station S, which selected men to become spies; an emphasis was placed on identifying and selecting people with certain personality strengths. Now the strategies used there, and other new ones, were to be developed further at IPAR to study and understand the role of personality in the effective functioning of people engaged in important nonmilitary endeavors. MacKinnon was made Founding Director and remained director until he retired in 1970.

MacKinnon selected a small, outstanding, and academically diverse seven-member staff. He chose two socially minded and psychoanalytically trained clinicians—Erik Erikson (who would later become famous for his eight-stage theory of lifespan development) and Nevitt Sanford (one of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality)—and a third clinical psychologist with strong interest in diagnosis, Robert Harris. The others were Harrison Gough, a young proponent of the new empirical approach to test construction; Richard Crutchfield, a social perception specialist; and two graduate students, Frank Barron and Ronald Taft. Wallace Hall would be MacKinnon’s assistant and IPAR archivist. I was hired to join the IPAR staff in 1955, and was the only woman on its professional staff for several decades.

In spite of disruption related to the loyalty oath controversy, basic plans, hypotheses, and procedures for assessments at IPAR were worked out in the first years. We will be describing some of these procedures in the next chapter, where we explain how we went about studying the Mills women.

FIGURE 2. Ravenna Helson at the beginning of the Mills study, 1960. Photograph courtesy of the Institute of Personality and Social Research, University of California, Berkeley.

During the early years several assessment techniques were developed and put into use. Gough developed the Adjective Check List (ACL) that would become an essential IPAR tool. He also built the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) to assess dimensions of effective functioning, modeled after the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the widely used inventory of mental illness. An important collaborator from the Institute of Human Development, Jack Block, produced the California Q sort, which became a third essential IPAR tool. Wallace Hall developed the Mosaic Construction Test, a measure of aesthetic sensitivity and originality. Crutchfield constructed experimental procedures to study conformity. Barron conceptualized aspects of effective personality, including complexity of outlook, independence of judgment, ego strength, and originality, and developed scales to measure them.

Clearly IPAR’s first years were very fruitful. From the beginning, the Highly Effective Person was the focus of investigation, with originality as one of the key features. This was an important change from the usual emphasis on the abnormal in psychological research studies. Creativity was a new frontier.

My Personal Quest Begins

When I arrived at IPAR, after graduating from UC and teaching for three years at Smith College, I was assigned to help Crutchfield develop perceptual tests, but I was thinking that I wanted to be a personality psychologist. Then one day MacKinnon called me into his office and asked me if I would like to take over the study of creativity in women, because Frank Barron, who had been scheduled to take this on, had all he could do with the study of writers. I was happy to take the job! Simone de Beauvoir’s recent book The Second Sex (1953) emphasized how women were subjugated. I thought it might also be true that women were different from men. In his integrative work on behavior, Heinz Werner had emphasized the variety of ways that humans and animals learn, and I thought we should consider whether men and women were creative in different ways. I would start with creativity in women mathematicians and soon after begin to study creative potential in the Mills women.

The 1950s: Studies of Highly Creative Men—and Women

In 1956 IPAR received funding from the Carnegie Corporation to conduct studies of highly creative persons. A strong public interest in creativity had developed that probably was an early aspect of the counterculture to come in the 1960s. In the midst of the conventionality of the 1950s, islands such as IPAR began to appear, questioning norms and ways of thinking about ourselves and our relationships.

MacKinnon (1962) gave a rationale for IPAR’s approach to studying creativity, and reviewed early findings in the American Psychologist. “True creativity,” he said, “includes novelty, adaptiveness, and a development of the new idea to the full” (p. 484). This conception of creativity meant that an individual’s creativity should be studied after it had been realized in identifiable creative products, and that criterion measures should be established by ratings done by qualified experts. I thought that the common notion of creativity put too much emphasis on originality, which was the more masculine aspect, neglecting the more feminine side of “developing an idea to the full.” MacKinnon’s concept incorporates this feminine aspect, and I think I helped him to it, in sharing my ideas.

The Cold War was a factor in funding IPAR’s pioneering studies of creativity in women because, in an attempt to maximize the nation’s intellectual resources, funding became available for the first time to consider women as part of those resources. I included women in studies of creative mathematicians and authors of fantasy for children . . . and then began the study of women seniors at Mills College. Up to this point, studies of creativity in women or by women were scarce. Ann Roe (1946) was one who did important work.

What Is a Personality Assessment?

To achieve the goal of person-centered research, IPAR needed to create a method to obtain a well-rounded picture of each person studied. To accomplish this, assessees were invited to the Institute building for a full day. The Institute building had been a fraternity house, so it included a living room, dining room, and kitchen on the first floor; many smaller rooms which became offices on the second floor; and an attic that was soon filled with testing apparatus. Assessees arrived in the morning for coffee and pastries and informal conversation, allowing staff to gather first impressions. The morning’s schedule might include tests of imagination and originality, and personality tests like the CPI. A leaderless group discussion, with the assesses talking in a circle surrounded by staff observers, was a context from which staff could get a different slant on the personal and relational style of each participant. Next came lunch, with participants and staff seated together, yet another opportunity to get to know assessees and how they interact with others. In the afternoon, one-on-one interviews and more testing were followed by a cocktail hour, still another unique interpersonal opportunity. The day concluded with a seated dinner followed by a fruitful context for observation, the playing of charades! Participants departed after a twelve-hour day, leaving the staff to spend the next several days documenting their observations through written summaries and standardized checklists, Q sorts, and other descriptive tools. When the observations were averaged, we usually had an accurate and well-rounded picture of each individual we were studying.

Assessments were held to collect as much information as possible about the characteristics of individuals in a particular sample, such as mathematicians, authors, mountain climber...