Bucking the System: Women in the Health
Sciences at the University of Iowa, 1874 - 1950

Iowa Child Welfare Research Station

ICWRS Nurses

Dr. Beth Wellman
1895 - 1952

In the 1930s Beth Wellman demonstrated that a person's intelligence quotient (IQ) is alterable depending on stimulation from the environment. Her findings shook the world of psychology and prompted the establishment of such programs as Head Start, Home Start and early education for the mentally retarded. Wellman's studies continue to hold implications for the battle against discrimination according to class, race and gender. Education and Academic Positions The daughter of the founder of Wellman, Iowa, Beth Lucy Wellman was born in Clarion in 1895. She graduated from Ames High School in 1912 and received her B.A. from the Iowa State Teachers College at Cedar Falls in 1920. In that same year she became secretary to Dr. Bird T. Baldwin, the first director of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (ICWRS), and enrolled in the psychology program at the University of Iowa. From 1921 to 1924 Wellman also worked as a research assistant at the Station. During this period she was responsible for taking all the physical measurements of the children in the preschool laboratories. Wellman then worked for a year as a research associate at Columbia University in New York City. She was offered the position of chief psychologist there and a similar position at Yale, but she returned to the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station as Research Assistant Professor after earning her PhD in child psychology in 1925. In 1937 she was appointed Professor of Child Psychology.

31. Dr. Beth Lucy Wellman (1895-1952) Professor of Child Psychology, The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station June 24, 1952

Personal Tragedies

32. Dr. Bird T. Baldwin(1875-1928) First Director of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (1917-28) circa 1925

Wellman and Bird T. Baldwin planned to marry in May 1928. On May 1 Baldwin traveled to a convention in Cleveland where he contracted erysipelas. He returned to Iowa City on May 4 in critical condition. He developed pneumonia and died May 12, 1928, a week before the wedding was scheduled to take place. Wellman became the legal guardian of Baldwin's three youngest children, twin boys ten years of age and a five-year old girl. Baldwin's invalid wife had died several years earlier and a live-in couple had cared for the four children. After Baldwin died, Wellman's mother moved into the new household. Her management of the household and finances enabled Wellman to pursue her professional goals.

In 1940 Wellman underwent surgery for breast cancer but returned to work soon after the mastectomy. The cancer eventually took her life in 1952.

Wellman and the "Nature vs. Nurture" Debate
As a scholar Wellman was extremely productive, publishing over seventy articles and overseeing many theses and dissertations. Marie Skodak Crissey, a member of one of Wellman's research teams in the 1930s, has recalled the long shadow cast by Wellman:

All students, not her advisees alone, regarded Beth Wellman as a role model -- for integrity, for respect for facts, for careful workmanship, for clarity of expression, for personal commitment to scientific inquiry. Beth Wellman labored in the modest Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, but influenced child welfare, child development research, and generations of professionals who put into action the implications of her research....Few studies begun in academic circles have had as much influence on public policy.

Before Wellman's controversial studies were published in the 1930s, psychologists and the general public attributed intelligence primarily to inheritance. Environment was not considered relevant to intellectual development. Wellman's findings that a child's IQ and scholastic performance depend on the quality of intellectual stimulation and social environment comprised a major portion of the "nature versus nurture" debate in the first half of this century. Her findings have had important implications for the struggle for equal rights in the second half of this century, as women and minorities struggle to disprove cultural stereotypes of their intellectual inferiority to white males -- stereotypes frequently reinforced in the ninteenth and early twentieth centuries by ostensibly "scientific" studies.

Wellman studied children from both privileged and disadvantaged backgrounds -- professors' children enrolled in the University of Iowa schools and children in the Davenport Soldiers' Orphans' Home. She found that children who attended the University preschools, which were known to be intellectually stimulating, gained significantly in IQ, sometimes moving from the "average" to the "genius" classification. This dramatic rise in IQ was found to have significant effects on later intellectual ability and achievement. In comparison, children who attended public schools showed little or no change in intelligence, had lower scores on performance tests, and accomplished less at the university level. Wellman's studies demonstrated the importance of early education and intellectual stimulation, both of which were shown to have lifelong effects. Another study that produced startling results was carried out by Wellman, together with her colleagues Skeels, Updegraff and Williams, on children aged two to five in the Davenport Soldiers' Orphans' Home. A preschool was established at the orphanage "to add richness to the lives of the children," as Beth Wellman explained in a 1939 interview. Two groups of preschool-age children were formed; the subjects in each group were matched at the beginning of the study according to age, IQ, sex, length of residence in the institution and nutritional status. Only one group attended the preschool during the three-year period. The research team found that preschool enhanced the intelligence of the children who attended it, and, more surprisingly, that the intelligence of those children who did not attend the preschool actually decreased.

33. Beth Wellman Measuring the Length of a Child's Lower Arm, ICWRS circa 1921 Although research associates and the director of anthropometry were responsible for overseeing the division's extensive studies, the graduate student research assistants, of which Beth Wellman was one, took most of the measurements. Wellman, under recommendation by Baldwin, also assisted in anthropometric studies at Stanford University and at the Teacher's College of Columbia University #196-171

The evidence for loss of intelligence was shocking. Wellman's findings suggested that placement in institutions for some mentally disabled children could have been avoided if they had received greater early intellectual stimulation. The results highlighted the need for improvements in state institutions and for early education of many disadvantaged groups in society.

Historical Impact
The impact of Wellman's research and publications extended far beyond academic circles. In his tribute to Wellman, Boyd McCandless, director of the Station at the time of her death, attested to Wellman's influence:

Her contributions to the literature on the development of intelligence, cultural and educational impacts upon intelligence, motor development, and the social psychology of childhood are known to all in psychology, have had profound impacts on practices in social work and education, as well as in psychology, and have stimulated much further research.

By all surviving accounts, Cora B. Hillis was a remarkable woman. It was her dream to improve the quality of human life through the scientific study of healthy children; the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (ICWRS) was the product of years of planning and persuading. When established in 1917, the ICWRS was one of America's first institutions for the study of child development. Hillis's commitment to improving children's health and social environment began in her own home. At age twenty, she assumed responsibility for raising her younger sister, who had a spinal disease. Doctors had predicted she wouldn't live, but Hillis was convinced that her sister could lead a satisfying and productive life. Under Hillis's care, her sister eventually went to college and became active in social and charity work. Hillis was instrumental in the establishment of a free children's ward in Des Moines's Iowa Methodist Hospital and worked toward the passage of the Iowa juvenile court law, adopted in 1904. However, these early victories were dampened by the deaths of three of her five children.

34. Cora Bussey Hillis no date Courtesy of the Iowa State Historical Society

During the last twenty-five years of her life, Hillis concentrated her energies on establishing and promoting the ICWRS. She was aware that at Iowa's many agricultural research stations crops and livestock were studied to determine the best and strongest characteristics of each and records were carefully maintained and analyzed. Hillis believed the same kind of research that enhanced the production of hogs, cattle, soybeans and corn could be used to improve "human stock" as well:

Give the normal child the same scientific study by research methods that we give to crops and cattle. Study his inheritance, racially, physically, temperamentally, and socially; his prenatal development, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and youth. Learn how the normal child develops in body, mind, and spirit and gradually evolve a science of child rearing by accumulated, comparative data and by intensive study of selected groups carried on through the years under natural conditions and in a controlled environment.

It took nearly twenty years for Hillis to see her dream come true. To convince those in power of the importance of her idea and its likely impact on future generations, Hillis went to the state universities of Iowa. She approached five presidents on the two campuses during the early 1900s, but each time she was turned away. Hillis recalled that "one seemed to be seeing the light when he suddenly whirled around in his chair and said, 'There is a great work you can do for this University, Mrs. Hillis, if you want to work. You can get us a set of chimes in a campanile to ring out over the campus.'" She arose, saying quietly, "I cannot work for a set of chimes. The forces I wish to set in motion will reach far beyond the confines of this campus and endure through all eternity."

35. Carl Emil Seashore (1866-1949) Psychologist and Dean of the Graduate College (1908-1936) The University of Iowa circa 1933 "Dr. Carl E. Seashore, Dean of the Graduate College, one of the world's great psychologists, took this vagrant child of mine to his heart and thereafter literally fathered it." --Cora Bussey Hillis

Finally, in 1914, President Thomas H. MacBride of the University of Iowa agreed to her proposal. Dr. Carl Seashore, a prominent psychologist who was also dean of the UI graduate college, supported her idea. Now Hillis campaigned across the state to gather wide support for the Station. The ICWRS bill was defeated in the first round of the 1915 Iowa Legislature, even though the original funding proposal of $50,000 was cut in half. Editorials condemning the rejection of the bill appeared in many papers. The following excerpt from an editorial printed in the Cedar Rapids Gazetteon April 6, 1915, reflects the common "farm research vs. child research" theme: Iowa is a back number when it comes to giving any amount of aid to the child welfare movement. We are too busy raising hogs and corn to pay much attention to the children. This is an agricultural state. Possibly it is all right that most of our attention is given to farming and kindred subjects. Probably it is all wrong. What Iowa needs is diversification, to get back to a favorite term of the agriculturist, who rightly claims that Iowa should branch out in her farming and deal with something else than corn.

Let's apply that advice to every line, not only to farming. From top to bottom and side to side Iowa needs broadening. Her legislators should open their eyes to some of the movements fostered for the advancement of people as well as blooded livestock, of manufacturing as well as corn growing, of society as well as farms. But, to get back to the past attitude of the legislature, its action on two bills last Friday is rather interesting.

One bill provided for the establishment of a child welfare research bureau. It was defeated. Another bill providing for the erection of a sheep barn at the state fair grounds was approved by the house as readily as though it might have been a gift of a million dollars to each representative.

The child welfare measure sought $25,000 for the establishment of a bureau where child problems would be dealt with the year around. The sheep barn measure sought $25,000 for the erection of a structure which will be used one week out of the fifty-two.

36. The Delineator
September 1921
Cora Bussey Hillis' speeches such as "Child Culture vs. Corn Culture" were slated between
talks on fencing, manuring fields, and breeding hogs at county Farmers' Institutes. Wrote
one rural newspaper on Hillis, "She succeeded in taking the attention of the farmer for the
time from corn, cattle, hogs, and rotation of crops and centered it upon the home, the boy,
and the tired mother." Hillis eventually organized a women's department within the institutes
for greater integration of home and farm.

--Ginalie Swaim, The Palimpsest,1979
Reproduction courtesy of the Iowa State Historical Society

Even though the bill did not pass during the first round, more than 300,000 men and women across the state had been made aware of the cause and had taken an interest in the Station. Hillis organized her forces for the second campaign, sending letters and plans all over the state to muster more support.

In the spring of 1916, the House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 79 to 6. The Senate, though, was harder to win over. Some senators argued that children should be raised in a home and not in a laboratory, and that "the God-given love of the mother" was sufficient.

When the United States entered World War I the Senate argued that all available funds were needed for military purposes, and that the Station bill should not be considered. At this time, however, the public learned that many young Iowans were physically unfit and because of this had been rejected for military duty. This was a strong argument in favor of the Iowa Child Welfare bill and Hillis used it to great advantage. She organized public opinion and galvanized her volunteer forces so that within a few weeks letters urging the adoption of the bill were on the desk of every legislator in Iowa. On April 21, 1917, the bill passed, 38 to 5.

When Hillis died in an automobile accident in 1924, she was recognized not only as the founder of the Research Station but for the broad scope of her dreams. In the words of Dr. Bird T. Baldwin, the first director of the Station, Hillis "was a woman of tireless energy, rare vision, had an unlimited love for children, and an unbounded faith in human betterment...She was one of America's great women." Thanks to her crusade, the University of Iowa is recognized as a pioneer in child development and welfare. Many institutions and programs in this and other countries have been patterned after the example of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. Hillis said of her own involvement with the Station: "I am grateful to have had a part in its beginning, for it is very dear to me, second only to my children in my affection."

37. Cora Bussey Hillis (1858-1924) Founder of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station circa 1923 "Mrs. Hillis' fertile mind gave birth to that central idea of the possibility of bringing all the forces of modern science to bear upon the improvement of the normal child. And she lived to see other states and many distant nations of the world accept and act upon this vision of a truly great Iowa woman." --Dr. Carl Seashore