Far More Than Dutiful Daughter: Milicent Shinn's Child Study and Education Advocacy After 1898

Previous scholarship on the life of psychologist Milicent Shinn (E. Scarborough & L. Furumoto, 1987) emphasized Shinn's failure to pursue an academic career in psychology following her PhD in 1898. Scarborough and Furumoto used Shinn as an example of the family claimthe career limitations women faced in terms of their family obligations. This narrative, however, obscured Shinn's continued engagement with child study before and after her years in graduate school, as a recent article documenting Shinn's leadership of network of home-based observers of infant development makes clear (C. von Oertzen, 2013). This article challenges the traditional retelling of Shinn's story still further, by exploring how Shinn used her professional contacts from her previous role as editor of the Overland Monthly to promote a wide range of causes related to child study and education. Following G. Lerner (1979), the author attends to Shinn's own values, such as her love of California, education, and her family. These values suggest a much more positive evaluation of Shinn's life work and the domestic environment in which she conducted her research and advocacy work.