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Gender and Eyewitness Testimony at the Turn of the Twentieth Century A Dangerous Women and Reasonable Men: Gender and Eyewitness Testimony at the turn of the Twentieth Century A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History at the University of Canterbury Jess Meares University of Canterbury 2016 Acknowledgements Support from numerous people has made the completion of this thesis possible. I would like to thank my supervisor, Heather Wolffram, for her invaluable support, suggestions, patience and critiques throughout this process. Thank you for picking me from a piece of paper and giving me the opportunity to study something completely new and enthralling. Thank you to the Marsden Fund. Without their financial support this thesis would not have been possible. To Jane Buckingham, thank you for your time and advice. Your knowledge and encouragement were instrumental in the final stages of this work. Endless gratitude to my mother, who has read every piece of writing I have ever submitted. Your brilliance and generosity is unparalleled. To my dad, whose motivational mantras, curry lunches, and unwavering faith kept me going. To my sister, whose love and support can be felt no matter where in the world we are. Thanks to Maddy, who went above and beyond flatmate duties with her proofreading skills and late night thesis talk-throughs. To Jane and Vince Vella-Brincat, my Christchurch parents. Thank you for welcoming me into your home. To the other Postgraduate fourth floor students of the Locke building, particularly Ruth and Hannah, thank you for the tea breaks, lunch dates and hallway chats. And to everyone who has expressed an interest in my research, your time and curiosity meant more than you know. Thank you. i Abstract The application of the scientific method to questions of human behaviour and abilities in the late nineteenth century allowed for the validation or contestation of ideas about female intellectual and biological inferiority. The convergence of traditional common sense understandings and experimental findings as forms of evidence of women’s unreliability can be observed in texts on witness psychology. This discourse was multi-disciplinary and international, with psychologists, lawyers, jurists and criminologists in Western Europe and North America engaging with each others’ work. They produced articles in disciplinary and popular journals, as well as books and compilations; at times collaborating with one another and at others competing over intellectual territory and expert status. This thesis examines the ways in which gender difference was portrayed in areas pertaining to witness reliability – perception, recollection, and honesty. It examines the connection between women’s lesser position in society and their portrayal as inferiors in intellectuals’ conceptions of reliability. Academia was overwhelmingly male in the period under discussion – 1880 to 1920 – and this dominance, combined with patriarchal conceptions of women, privileged the male as ‘normal’, while portraying women as mentally deficient. The thesis also assesses the ways in which feminist movements enabled women to pursue academic careers, and how their research on gendered mentality eventually began to challenge the dominant narrative of female witness unreliability. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ i Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ ii Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1 Professionalisation of Psychology ............................................................................................... 4 Witness Reliability as a Psychological Issue ........................................................................... 8 Disciplinary Disputes ..................................................................................................................... 11 Intellectual History: Geographic Boundaries ...................................................................... 13 Historical Analysis of Women and Psychology ................................................................... 20 Gendered Language ........................................................................................................................ 21 Structure .............................................................................................................................................. 23 Chapter 1: Jurists’ Attitudes towards Female Testimony ............................. 27 Biology and Common Understandings as Evidence of Gender Difference ............. 29 Common Understandings of Women in Conceptions of Female Criminality ........ 34 Female Characteristics and their Impact on Witness Reliability ................................ 36 Evidentiary Similarities between Lombroso and Gross in their Evaluations of Gender .................................................................................................................................................. 43 Chapter 2: The Origins of the Psychology of Testimony ................................ 48 Spiritualism’s Threat to Experimental Psychology .......................................................... 50 Ignoring Women in Early Experiments on Witness Reliability ................................... 56 Chapter 3: Analysis of Social Groups and the Impact of Identity on Reliability ................................................................................................................................. 72 Gender Differences in Memory and Honesty in Children .............................................. 76 G. Stanley Hall, Male Biological Superiority and Gender Roles ................................... 79 Ignoring Gender in Early Suggestibility Studies ................................................................ 86 Gender Differences in Memory and Perception in Adults ............................................. 92 German Discourse on Gendered Memory and Perception .......................................... 100 Chapter 4: Disputes over Disciplinary Boundaries and Accord over Female Witnesses .............................................................................................................. 106 Münsterberg’s Attack on the Legal Profession ................................................................. 108 Münsterberg’s Portrayal of Female Witnesses ................................................................. 117 Juridical Understandings of Female Witnesses ................................................................ 125 Chapter 5: Female Psychological Perspectives of Gendered Reliability ...................................................................................................................................................... 130 Challenges to Women’s Higher Education and Academic Careers .......................... 133 Female Contributions to the Psychological Study of Gendered Intelligence ....... 139 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 148 Bibliography .......................................................................................................... 155 iii Introduction “The boy just growing out of childhood, in so far as he has been well brought up, is especially the best observer and witness there is…while the girl of the same age is often an unreliable, even dangerous witness.”1 Austrian criminal jurist Hans Gross wrote the words inscribed above in 1898 when musing on the drawbacks of relying on a young girl’s testimony in criminal cases. His insights into the relationship between gender and witness reliability reverberate throughout many other intellectual texts published at the turn of the twentieth century. Regardless of the disciplinary origins of the author – whether it was in psychology, criminology, law, or the physical sciences – their texts display a shared understanding that men were more reliable than women. This thesis examines scholarship published within Western academia that considered topics pertaining to witness reliability – memory, perception and honesty – and will assess how academics constructed the idea of ‘the witness’ around the image of men as the reliable assessors of the world, and women as untrustworthy and inherently unreliable.2 The turn of the twentieth century saw significant changes in how Western society functioned and the ways in which intellectuals understood these functions. The rise of social movements in North America and Europe challenged the existing social structure that privileged upper-class white men above all others. In the North American context, the aftermath of the 1 Hans Gross, Criminal Psychology: A Manual for Judges, Practitioners, and Students, trans. Horace M. Kallen (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1918), 366. 2 Stephanie A. Shields, “Passionate Men, Emotional Women: Psychology Constructs Gender Difference in the late 19th century,” History of Psychology 10 (2007): 97. 1 Civil War (1861–1865) saw the establishment of first wave feminism, the early black civil rights movement, and employment unions.3 In Western Europe these organized
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