Janet Taylor Spence
Overview of Janet Taylor Spence's Life:
Janet Taylor Spence was an American
clinical, experimental, and social psychologist, known for her studies on
motivation and on gender identity. She
was born on August 29, 1923 in Toledo, Ohio.
Her parents John and Helen met after John was wounded in the Canadian
Army and moved to New York. Her parents
moved to Toledo and married. Spence was
the elder of two daughters. Her sister
was born four years after her. Her
parents were activist in their community, which gave her daughters a feel for
the suffering that was happening. Her mother was quite influential to Spence as
she was growing up. Helen Taylor worked
for the League of Women Voters, managed Republican election campaigns, and
became director of a social service agency.
After only two years of high school in Massachusetts, Spence enrolled at
Oberlin College, a liberal arts school in Ohio. She graduated in 1945 and
continued her studies at Yale University where she entered the graduate clinical psychology program. She
decided to move to Iowa so that she could work with Kenneth Spence, whom she
met at Yale. They later married in
1959. Spence received her Ph.D. in 1949
from Iowa University. Janet Taylor
Spence retired in 1997 and is currently living in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Work/Professional Life:
Spence had two main areas of focus,
anxiety and gender. While working at as
a graduate student at the University of Iowa, she began working with anxiety
research. She studied whether anxiety was
a dispositional trait. She then
developed a scale that would be able to measure how anxiety relates to
performance, and named in the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (MAS). This 50 question scale is still widely used
in psychological research today. Spence
joined the psychology department of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois,
as the first woman faculty member. After
two years, she was promoted from instructor to assistant professor and she
became an associate professor in 1956.
While being a teacher and working on research, Spence published eighteen
papers and co-authored a statistics textbook during her ten years at
Northwestern. Her husband was offered a
job in Texas and she went with him and got a job working for department of Educational Psychology at the University.
Spence studied motivation and reinforcement. The way she did it was first working with
schizophrenics and then applied her methods to developmental issues in
children. It was during this time that
her main focus was on intrinsic motivation on individual performance. After her husband’s death, Spence joined the
psychology department of the University of Texas where she spent four years as
department chair. Spence served on the
editorial boards of a number of psychology journals and, from 1973 until 1979,
she edited Contemporary Psychology.
She also has worked with the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. Spence was as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences in 1978 and, in 1979, she became Ashbel Smith Professor of
Psychology and Educational Psychology at the University of Texas.
Connection to Class Material:
The way that Spence’s work relates to our
class is that she began to study gender.
She had read bias research by one of her colleagues and this started
research of her own. Spence worked with Helmreich and performed a study to explore
the competency in women. This study had produced a new scale called the Attitudes Toward Women Scale. This scale was necessary because a scale had
never been developed to test their hypothesis.
The Attitudes Toward Women Scale
included questions on a scale about women's place in society. The article by
Taylor Spence and Helmreich which described this study was published in 1972
under the title, "Who likes competent women? Competence, sex-role
congruence of interest, and subjects' attitudes toward women as determinants of
interpersonal attraction". The study was the first in her gender research
career. She did much more research on
gender. Another one her studies included
another important test called the Personal Attributes Questionnaire developed in
1974. The reason that Janet Taylor
Spence relates so well to our class is because she is among the first to work
with gender research. She believed that
gender must be studied in a multi-dimensional way.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406000611.html
http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/spence.html
http://www.feministvoices.com/Janet-Taylor-Spence/
http://psychology.okstate.edu/museum/women/p-sp.html
