Magda B. Arnold's life and work in context

Abstract

This paper provides a biographical and historical context for understanding and appreciating Magda B. Arnold's (1903–2002) theory and research on emotion. It situates Arnold's work in the context of mid-century emotion theory, the status of women psychologists, and pre-Cognitive Revolution psychology more generally. In considering Arnold's life and work, three themes stand out and deserve emphasis: (1) Arnold's lifelong passion and commitment to her project of grounding the psychology of emotion in brain processes; (2) the tensions and complementarities between her identity as a hardnosed scientist and a person of deep religious faith; and (3) the larger scientific and scholarly context within which her long and complex life and career unfolded.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Elizabeth Fair for her research assistance. I am indebted to C. J. Boyle, archivist at Spring Hill College, for material connected with Arnold's years at Spring Hill. I also thank Alexandra Rutherford and fellow contributors to this special issue for their comments on the manuscript. My special thanks to Joan Arnold who generously has shared her mother's unpublished autobiography with me and other emotion researchers.

Notes

¹Quotes of Magda Arnold are taken from her unpublished and undated autobiography unless otherwise noted (Arnold, n.d). According to her family and students, the autobiography was initially written in 1987 and edited periodically thereafter. There is no definitive date for the final version, but it is likely to be about 1996. See also Shields and Fields (2003), Fields (2004), and Shields (2006).

²Reference to Catholics and Catholicism throughout this paper refer specifically to Roman Catholicism.

³The ferment around anti-intellectualism within Catholicism was intensified by anti-intellectualism's implied connection with McCarthyism, the bizarre and chilling search for suspected communists and communist sympathisers that drove the Army–McCarthy hearings of April–June 1954. Gleason (1995) notes that, “since Catholics were widely assumed to be overwhelmingly pro-McCarthy, Catholic liberals, who abominated the junior senator from Wisconsin [Joseph McCarthy], had special reason to be concerned about anti-intellectualism” (p. 288).

⁴Arnold identifies the summer of 1948 in her autobiography, but in an unpublished tribute to Gasson in November 1974 (Spring Hill College archives), she writes that they met in her course on Abnormal Psychology at Harvard in summer 1947.

⁵The Amsterdam Symposium (Manstead, Frijda, & Fischer, 2004) was modelled on Wittenberg, Mooseheart, and Loyola in aiming to provide an interdisciplinary stocktaking of the field at the millennium.

⁶During World War II women were recruited to work in factories and shipyards in jobs that entailed both physical and skilled labour. Before the war, women would only rarely have had access to these jobs that paid better than conventional “women's work”. The image of “Rosie the Riveter” as a strong, can-do woman was used in government campaigns as part of the war effort to encourage women to enter these occupations previously closed to them. At the war's conclusion, and with returning war veterans seeking work, women were dismissed from these jobs and no longer hired for them.

⁷Increasing the proportion of women in the field by itself does not reduce the barriers to women nor rectify the effects of past inequities (Shields, 1999a; Stewart & Shields, 2001; Valian, 1998). The science of psychology has not escaped the incursion of sexism and bias in practice (Sherif, 1979).