Florence Goodenough and child study: The question of mothers as researchers

This article examines the views of early developmental psychologist Florence Goodenough, summarizing her contributions to the field, her complex viewpoints on science and gender issues, and her arguments for maternal record-keeping as a valuable scientific strategy, as drawn from her writings in textbooks, popular magazine articles, and private correspondence. During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, when Goodenough enjoyed a high professional profile as a research scientist, the field of child psychology shifted from focus on producing applied knowledge to benefit parents and educators to a preference for laboratory-controlled basic science approaches to understanding development. Goodenough championed observation and other descriptive methods, including use of mothers as data collectors in the home, even while these approaches were increasingly discredited by prominent peers in the United States. I argue that Goodenough's allegiance to maternal record-keeping highlights a forgotten strand of context-sensitive, descriptive work that survived despite its general disparagement among proponents of a narrower version of strictly experimental developmental science emerging in the 1920s.