Evelyn Hooker (September 2 1907–November 18 1996) was a North American
psychologistA psychologist is someone who studies the human mind and behavior. Research psychologists study human perception, cognition, attention, emotion, motivation, personality, behavior and interpersonal relationships...
most notable for her 1957 paper "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual" in which she administered psychological tests to groups of self-identified homosexuals and heterosexuals and asked experts, based on those tests alone, to select the homosexual people. The experiment, which other researchers subsequently repeated, demonstrates that most self-identified homosexuals are no worse in social adjustment than the general population.
Life
She was born Evelyn Gentry and grew up with 8 brothers and sisters in the Colorado Plains. When she was 13, her family moved to
Sterling, ColoradoThe City of Sterling is a Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and the most populous city of Logan County, Colorado, United States. The United States Census Bureau estimates that the city population was 12,589 in 2005.-Geography:...
.
In 1924 she became a student at the
University of ColoradoThe University of Colorado at Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado. It is the flagship university of the University of Colorado system and was founded five months before Colorado was admitted to the union in 1876...
while working as a maid for a rich
BoulderBoulder is a Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and most populous city of Boulder County, Colorado, in the United States. Boulder is the 11th most populous city in the state of Colorado. The United States Census Bureau estimates that in 2008 the population of the city of Boulder was...
family. Her mentor, Dr Karl Munzinger, guided her in her challenge of the then prevalent psychological theory of behaviourism. He invited her to write her own case history. After receiving her Masters degree, she became one of 11 women involved in the PhD program in psychology at
Johns Hopkins UniversityThe Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Johns Hopkins also maintains full-time campuses elsewhere in Maryland, Washington, D.C., Italy, China, and Singapore...
, Baltimore,
MarylandMaryland is a state located in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia to the south and west, Pennsylvania to the north, and Delaware to the east. It is comparable in size to the European country of Belgium. According to the U.S...
, having been refused referral to
YaleRapidMiner is an environment for machine learning and data mining experiments. It allows experiments to be made up of a large number of arbitrarily nestable operators, described in XML files which are created with RapidMiner's graphical user interface...
. She was awarded her PhD in 1932.
In her early career, she wasn't especially interested in the psychology of lesbians or gays. After teaching for only one year at the Maryland College for Women, she contracted
tuberculosisTuberculosis is a common and often deadly infectious disease caused by mycobacteria...
and spent the next year in a sanatorium in
ArizonaThe State of Arizona is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. The capital and largest city is Phoenix. The second largest city is Tucson, followed in size by the four Phoenix metropolitan area cities of Mesa, Glendale, Chandler, and Scottsdale.Arizona was the 48th and...
. In 1937 Evelyn received a fellowship to go to Europe. She enrolled at the Berlin Institute of Psychotherapy. She witnessed mass hysteria on the triumphant return of Hitler to
BerlinBerlin is the capital city and one of sixteen states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union...
after the
AnschlussThe ' , also known as the ', was the 1938 de facto annexation of Austria into Greater Germany by the Nazi regime....
.
However, during the 1940s, she first became interested in what would turn out to be her life's work. In 1942 while a teacher at UCLA, Evelyn married writer Don Caldwell. She became close to one of her students, Sam From, who introduced her in 1943 to the gay and lesbian subculture of the time. He challenged her to scientifically study "people like him." Despite the social, moral and scientific climate of the post-war period, Hooker became increasingly convinced that most gay men were perfectly socially adjusted and that this could be proven through scientific tests.
Over the next two decades, she became established professionally. In 1948 she divorced her husband and moved to a guest cottage at the Salter Avenue home of Edward Hooker, professor of English at UCLA and poetry scholar. They married in London in 1951. In the mid 50s
Christopher IsherwoodChristopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist.- Life and work :Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in the North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, was stationed...
became their neighbor and they became friends. Sam From died in a car accident in 1956, just before her ground-breaking research was published. Hooker's husband died in January 1957 of a heart attack.
The 1960s saw her work win a wider audience, and her conclusions were taken up by the gay rights movement. In 1961 Hooker was invited to lecture in Europe and in 1967, the director of the
National Institute of Mental HealthThe National Institute of Mental Health is part of the federal government of the United States and the largest research organization in the world specializing in mental illness. It is one of the 27 component organizations of the National Institutes of Health , which is in turn part of the U.S....
(NIMH) asked her to produce a report on what the institution should do about homosexual men.
Richard NixonRichard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States and is the only president to resign the office. He was also the 36th Vice President of the United States ....
's election in 1969 delayed the publication of the report which was published by a magazine and without authorisation in 1970. The report recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the provision of similar rights to both homosexual and heterosexual people. The burgeoning gay rights movement seized on this.
She retired from her research at the age of 63 and opened a private practice. Most of her clients were gay men and lesbians.
Experiment
Although, since 1954, Hooker had collected data about her homosexual friends, she felt this was of little value because of the lack of scientific rigor attached to the gathering of this data. She applied for a grant from the NIMH which she received.
She gathered two groups of men: one group would be exclusively homosexual, the other exclusively heterosexual. She contacted the
Mattachine SocietyThe Mattachine Society was one of the earliest lasting homophile organizations in the United States, founded in 1950. The Society for Human Rights in Chicago predated the Mattachine Society, but was shut down by the police after only a few months....
to find homosexual men. She had greater difficulty finding heterosexual men. She also had to use her home to conduct the interview to protect people's anonymity.
Hooker used three different psychological tests for her study: the
TATThe Thematic Apperception Test is an example of a projective test.Historically, the Thematic Apperception Test or TAT has been among the most widely used, researched, and taught projective psychological tests...
, the Make-a-Picture-Story test (MAPS test), and the
Rorschach inkblot testThe Rorschach test is a psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex scientifically derived algorithms, or both...
.
After a year of work, Hooker presented a team of 3 expert evaluators with 60 unmarked psychological profiles. She decided to leave the interpretation of her results to other people so as to avoid her own prejudice.
First, she contacted
Bruno KlopferBruno Klopfer was born in Bavaria, Germany on 1 October, 1900.He had a profound impact on the development of psychological personality testing, and was an important pioneer and innovator in the development, scoring and popularization of projective techniques, especially the Rorschach inkblot...
, an expert on Rorschach tests to see if he would be able to identify the sexual orientation of people through their results at those tests. He couldn't.
Then
Edwin ShneidmanEdwin S. Shneidman was an American suicidologist and thanatologist. Along with co-workers from the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center Shneidman provided a major stimulus to research into suicide and its prevention...
, creator of the MAPS test, also analyzed the 60 profiles. It took him six months and he too found that both groups were highly similar in their psychological make-up.
The third expert was Dr Mortimer Mayer who was so certain he would be able to tell the two groups apart that he went through the process twice.
The three evaluators agreed that in terms of adjustment, there were no differences between the members of each group.
In 1956 Hooker presented the results of her research in a paper delivered to the
American Psychological AssociationThe American Psychological Association is a professional organization representing psychologists in the U.S., with around 150,000 members and an annual budget of around $70m...
's convention in Chicago.
Hooker was the first social scientist to do research and write on the gay community.
Her studies contributed to a change in the attitudes of the psychological community towards homosexuality and to the
American Psychiatric AssociationThe American Psychiatric Association is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the most influential worldwide. Its some 38,000 members are mainly American but some are international...
's decision to remove homosexuality from its handbook of disorders in 1973. This in turn helped change the attitude of society at large.
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