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.

Leta then attended Valentine High School, where she excelled in the classroom and discovered her talent and passion for writing.

Harry Hollingworth moved to New York to do graduate work at Columbia University and completed his doctorate under James Cattell.

She graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1906, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree, along with a State Teacher's Certificate.

[9] 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.

[10] 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.

[10] In 1913, she received her master's degree in education at Columbia [2] 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.

During this decade Leta also fought for women's suffrage and belonged to the progressive era group the Feminist Alliance.

The Civil Service began to supervise the administration of the tests in 1914, and demanded that examiners take competitive exams to determine their capability.

She completed her doctoral work at Columbia under Edward L. Thorndike, while maintaining the position of consulting psychologist for the New York Police Department.

[6] 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.

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.

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.

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.

"[2] 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.

This included information on their backgrounds, family life and circumstances, their psychological states and makeup, and also their physical, temperamental and social traits.

As a result, the curriculum consisted of learning about such things as food, clothing, shelter, transport, tools, time keeping and communication.

Fully aware that she would never live long enough to see all of the children into their adulthood, Hollingworth meticulously attempted to build a framework upon which future research findings could be accomplished.

"[13] Hollingworth was able to work past all of these concerns and conducted research that benefited science while maintaining participant privacy at the same time.

[6] The results of the study suggested that many exceptionally gifted children suffer adjustment problems due to two factors: inept treatment by adults and lack of intellectual challenge.

Thorndike agreed to supervise her dissertation on functional periodicity, which focused on the idea that women are psychologically impaired during menstruation.

For the study, she recorded the results of both women's and men's performances on a variety of cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks daily for three months.

Upon receiving her Ph.D. in 1916, Leta Stetter Hollingworth accepted Thorndike's offer of a position at the Columbia Teachers College.

She believed that women do not reach positions of prominence due to the social roles that are assigned to them, not because they are intellectually inferior to men.

[citation needed] She also was responsible for Terman modifying his nativistic position concerning gender differences in intelligence testing.

[citation needed] Leta Hollingworth died on November 27, 1939, at the age of 53 of abdominal cancer at the Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan.