Ethel Dench Puffer's Psychological Aesthetics and the Woman Question

This paper examines Ethel Dench Puffer's psychological aesthetics, attempting to connect her academic research with her role as Director of the Institute for the Coördination of Women's Interests at Smith College. Psychologist, educator, and active participant in the women's rights movement of the 1910s-1930s, Puffer enrolled at Radcliffe College in 1897/1898 and earned her Ph.D. in 1902. She advocated for women's desire to balance marriage and career in several classic articles concerning the 'woman question' (1922 and 1929), specifically focusing on the continuity of women's education. More than 20 years after the publication of her book, The Psychology of Beauty (1905a), she drew on psychological concepts and methodology to support the effectiveness of her Institute's strategies, which aimed to help women integrate their professional and family lives. Echoing Mary Parker Follett, Puffer asserted that social progress arises from adopting modern psychology's methodologies to create an environment that encourages the integration of women's interests. She insisted that a desirable environment could make such integrated conduct a 'reflex response'-meaning it became possible and natural for women not to need to choose between motherhood and a flexible professional career. Her intertwining of aesthetic psychology and social issues resonates with (and indeed empowers) pragmatist conceptions of progress that presuppose the necessity of recognising individuals' concrete needs and capacities and of creating social mechanisms that enable those capacities to fulfil those needs effectively.