Mary Whiton Calkins (/ˈkɔːlkɪnz, ˈkæl-/; 30 March 1863 – 26 February 1930[1]) was an American philosopher and psychologist, whose work informed theory and research of memory, dreams and the self.

She taught psychology and philosophy at Wellesley College for four decades, and conducted research there and at Harvard University for the majority of that time.

[4] Since Mary's father took an active role in overseeing his children's education and planned her studies, she was able to enroll in college when she graduated high school.

[6] Although women had had more educational opportunities to attend and teach at colleges back then, Calkins still faced sexism in the field and didn't have many options to earn a degree in psychology.

[2] Harvard did not permit women to study at their institution, but it allowed her to sit in on lectures after her father and Wellesley's president had sent letters asking for her admittance.

Calkins decided to take classes at Harvard Annex (predecessor of Radcliffe College), taught by Josiah Royce.

However, Harvard president Charles William Eliot opposed this idea of a woman learning in the same room as a man.

[7] With pressure from James and Royce, along with a petition from Calkins' father, Eliot allowed her to study in the classes, with the stipulation that she was a guest, and not a registered student.

[9] Following her training under James, Calkins worked alongside Edmund Sanford of Clark University, who later assisted her in setting up the first psychology laboratory run by women at Wellesley College.

[11] Calkins explains in her autobiography that the dream "merely reproduces in general the persons and places of recent sense perception and that is it rarely associated with that which is of paramount significance in one's waking experience".

[9] The results of a recent study done by Montangero and Cavallero (2015) suggest that the consecutive events of the dreams of their participants were rarely plausible, and often seemed to have no relation to one another.

After the laboratory was established, it quickly gained popularity; her first course on "psychology approached from the physiological standpoint" yielded over fifty students.

When Calkins began to make plans for furthering her education in psychology, advice from Sanford discouraged her from schools like Johns Hopkins and Clark, suggesting they were not likely to admit women as students much like her experience at Harvard.

Hugo would begin by training her in the detail of laboratory experiments, giving her a research problem based on records that the two of them had taken of their dreams over several weeks.

The "friendly, comradely, and refreshingly matter-of-fact welcome" that she received from the men working in Munsterberg's laboratory as assistants and students are described in her book with great appreciation.

[9] During this time, Calkins also studied memory, leading to her invention of the right associate's method, now known as the paired-associations technique.

[9] A series of Calkins' experiments under Hugo Münsterberg, taking place between 1894 and 1896, was concerned with the concept of recency as it relates to a person's ability to remember something.

[9] The formula where a subject is presented with a stimulus and asked to provide the appropriate response became a standard tool for studying human learning.

[14] Edward B. Titchener included her research in his Student's Manual, and in her autobiography, Calkins refers to a Professor Kline who selected the paired-associates method for his textbook, Psychology By Experiment.

Harvard refused to approve the unanimous recommendation of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology to grant Calkins her doctoral degree.

[17][18] Eliot believed strongly that the two sexes should be educated separately and, although he allowed Calkins to be a "guest," he and the rest of the board refused to grant her the degree.

"[13] Although the qualification has never been officially conferred, Calkins was the first woman[citation needed] to complete all the coursework, examinations, and research for a doctoral degree.

In 1902, Radcliffe offered doctoral degrees to Calkins and three other women who had completed their studies at Harvard but were not granted PhDs due to their gender.

You will be quick to see that, holding this conviction, I cannot rightly take the easier course of accepting the degree.Despite ongoing petitioning, as of 2015 Harvard University continues to refuse to posthumously award her with a doctoral degree.

Beginning in 1900, Calkins began to publish a series of papers in which she described psychology as a "science of the self" – this would be a premise to the development of her system of self-psychology.

[10][23] She spent a great deal of time working with the system of self-psychology, critically examining the self from both philosophical and psychological viewpoints.

[23] Her reasoning for self-psychology being so unpopular was a notion that "one is so constantly aware of one's self that one might understandably overlook it when reporting on a sensational experience," and adding that it led to a lack of reference to the self in introspective studies.

[6] Calkins was a suffragist,[6] disputing "in a democratic country, governed as this is by the suffrage of its citizens, and given over as this is to the principle and practice of educating women, a distinction based on the difference of sex is artificial and illogical".

[6] While working at Wellesley around the time of World War I, a colleague of Calkins was fired for holding pacifistic views.

[9] She also mentions the assistance of figures such as Robert MacDougall and several others who spent years with her as her mechanicians, subjects, counselors, and even friends.