102 4. WOMEN MATHEMATICIANSShe wrote a study of this subject that was published in the first volume of the
American Journal of Psychology in 1887. Vassar awarded her an honorary doctor
of laws degree that year.
The laboratories she had not been allowed to enter at Vassar were finally opened
to her in Germany, where her husband took a sabbatical (in Gottingen) in 1891- She took advantage of the occasion to spend some time in Berlin with the
great physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894). She presented the results of
her theory and experiments at a conference in London that year.
Upon returning to the United States, she began a long quest for a degree and
an academic position suited to her talents. Hopkins, where her husband continued
to teach, refused her applications year after year. She continued to work inde-
pendently (what else could she do?) and for many years played an active role in
administering fellowships to support postdoctoral work for women. Not until 1904
was she allowed to teach a course in psychology at Hopkins. The following year her
husband gave up mathematics in favor of journalism. He found a position in New
York in 1910, and they moved there. Remembering the "dean's rule" at Barnard
College, no one will be surprised to learn that as a married woman, she had no
hope of obtaining a position there. She was allowed, however, to lecture part-time
at Columbia University during 1912-1913. In 1913 she lectured at Harvard and
at Clark University, where her old professor from Johns Hopkins, William Edward
Story, was chair of the Mathematics Department and the president, G. Stanley
Hall (1844-1924), was a famous psychologist.^20 She also lectured at the Univer-
sity of Chicago in 1914. By this time, of course, she was no longer regarded as a
mathematician; her lectures were on psychology.
Except for the position of editor for Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and
Psychology, which she occupied from 1901 to 1905, she was excluded rather com-
pletely from participation in the professional life of a psychologist. In particular,
she was not allowed to attend meetings and deliver papers. Only in 1929 was she
finally able to publish a lifetime of work in psychology in her treatise Colour and
Colour Theories. This work was published simultaneously in London and New
York (which explains the British spelling of the title). In a great anticlimax in
1926, Johns Hopkins finally awarded her the Ph. D. in mathematics that she had
earned 43 years earlier. One hardly knows whether the old saying "better late than
never" applies in such a case. She died in 1930.
Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler. A few decades of social change can make a great
deal of difference to one's life. The social traditions and prejudice that deprived
Christine Ladd-Franklin of what would have been a brilliant career were, with
difficulty, overcome by one of the first American women to achieve recognition in
mathematics, Anna Johnson (later Anna Johnson Pell, still later Anna Johnson Pell
Wheeler). She was born in Iowa in 1883 and entered the University of South Dakota
in 1899, graduating in 1903. The following year she earned a master's degree at
the University of Iowa, and then in 1905 she earned a second master's degree at
Radcliffe. She remained there another year in order to study with two of the first
prominent American mathematicians, Harvard professors William Fogg Osgood
G. Stanley Hall was the first American to obtain a doctoral degree in psychology; he had been
a professor at Johns Hopkins during the early 1880s and had brought Sigmund Freud to lecture
at Clark in 1910.