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

Iowa Child Welfare Research Station

ICWRS Staff

As a pioneer in child development, Dr. Ruth Updegraff applied child psychology to the education of children aged two to six years. The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station (ICWRS) provided the setting for her work. Updegraff held the position of Administrative Supervisor of the Preschool Laboratories for more than three decades beginning in 1925. During this time, she also directed many research projects and taught courses in child psychology, child development and preschool education. Updegraff's skills were in particular demand from the beginning of the Depression through World War II. She trained teachers from all over the United States to meet the special needs of preschool children and parents during the crises. After she retired from teaching in 1964, Updegraff continued her work as a national consultant for Head Start and Follow Through. She officially retired in 1970. Updegraff came to the Station after two years' work in psychology at Vassar, her alma mater. Originally from Pennsylvania, she entered Vassar more upon her parents' decision than her own, she remembers. Updegraff double-majored in psychology and economics as an undergraduate. A 1924 Research Station publication on the psychology of the preschool child stimulated her interest in the subject. Attracted

38. Dr. Ruth Updegraff (1902-1999) Professor of Child Behavior and Development The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station circa 1950

to the Station where original research with young children was being conducted, Updegraff joined the staff as a graduate student research assistant. In 1928 she received her PhD in Child Welfare from the University of Iowa and was appointed Research Associate. She progressed through the ranks, finally becoming Professor of Child Behavior and Development in 1951.

Updegraff's first challenge at the Station was learning to work with the preschool children. She recalls her first assignment in the kindergarten room on the first day of school. As the children were arriving, one boy began to climb out onto the windowsill which was three stories above the street. The teacher called to Updegraff and said, "You go over and take care of that one."

The very concept of a preschoolwas new in the 1920s. A few nursery schoolsexisted in the country, but they were primarily custodial, not educational centers. The University of Iowa was the first institution to erect a building specifically for the study and education of children aged two to six years. "People were just beginning to think about what happens to the child between these ages," Updegraff recounts.

The Preschool Laboratories were established to provide children with early education outside the home, to help parents enrich their children's experience, and to provide staff with research subjects. Besides undergoing extensive measurements to chart their physical growth, the children also participated in numerous tests for the study of motor, social, and intellectual development. Children's speech, language use and oral comprehension were also studied. At the Preschool Laboratories, education was viewed as a joint project to be shared by the staff and the parents. Updegraff emphasized the importance of recognizing individual differences between children. She investigated learning and reasoning, aggression, reaction to failure, children's control of their peers, and their responses to adults and other children in varying situations. Updegraff states,

39. Boy Practicing Buttoning and Lacing ICWRS Preschool Laboratories circa 1924 One practical way to test motor coordination was to measure children's ability to dress themselves. Montessori developed a set of frames to practice daily activities such as buttoning, lacing, fastening snaps, hooking eyes and tying bows. Children under observation were given a set of seven frames to complete. A record of their successes, errors and the time for completing each task served as an index of their motor development. #196-74

In guiding a group of children, adults need to understand that they're all different--that there are realdifferences in their experiences. They're all developing at different rates. They have different problems and desires. How well can a child listen? How well will he listen? What are the child's likes and dislikes? What can you do to help him be with others, both young and old? Teachers need to know what they can about developmental psychology and they need to know what they can about the children they're working with and they need to work them together.

40. Children Playing with Modelling Clay ICWRS Preschool Laboratories circa 1924 Dr. Ruth Updegraff directed a pioneering study in the relative social value of play materials. Thirty-eight children playing in pairs were scientifically observed for five-minute intervals, first with clay and then with blocks. Updegraff concluded that "behavior of a sociable and cooperative type occurred more frequently during play with clay, while non-sociable and non-cooperative behavior had a higher frequency during play with blocks." #496-815A

Dr. Updegraff reports that many of her graduate students went on to distinguished university teaching and research careers in child development. The heavy demand for teachers trained at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station from the 1930s through the 1950s is evidence of the reputation Updegraff had established for her division. Even in the early years of the Preschool Laboratories, educators and researchers came from many universities to observe the model program at the University of Iowa. "The very purpose of it was innovative," states Updegraff. "The idea of it spread. People have continued to use the thinking and the scientific aspects of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station."

41. Children Playing with Blocks ICWRS Preschool Laboratories circa 1920 #496-835

In the 1930s and 1940s, Updegraff worked closely with family-focused federal agencies. She tailored her courses to meet the needs of children, parents, and teachers-in-training whose lives and professions were drastically affected by the Depression and World War II. During the Depression, unemployed teachers were sent to the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station for intense, twenty-day training periods directed by Updegraff. New preschools were established in communities throughout the country to provide these teachers with means of employment. During the war years government-financed nursery schools were also newly established from coast-to-coast, particularly in areas related to the war effort, such as in Portland, Oregon, where families were involved in round-the-clock shipbuilding. Once again, teachers were sent to the Station for special training.

After she retired from teaching in 1964, Updegraff became a consultant for Head Start programs. Begun as part of the vision for a "Great Society," Head Start was established under the Johnson administration. The program was designed to give young, underprivileged children access to health care and some of the educational and cultural advantages usually associated with a middle-class background. Parents were also instructed in the physical care of their children and in ways to develop various abilities. "This is the one program that has been scientifically evaluated and proven to be helpful," Updegraff asserts. She also served as a consultant for Follow Through, a program that studied former Head Start participants.

During the 1960s, the goals and methods of Head Start and Follow Through paralleled, on a national level, the three-year study of children at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home which Updegraff had conducted with Beth Wellman thirty years earlier. (See the exhibit on this study for more details.) Updegraff was able to witness the fruition of the ideas and practices she had initiated in child development and preschool education earlier in the century. She states, though, that our understanding of the development of the child under five years of age is far from complete: "In our current educational work for children, the study will probably continue long into the future."

42. ICWRS Preschool Children Resting
circa 1920
"That the child have adequate rest and that he learn to relax when rest is appropriate are objectives of the school program," stated Updegraff in her manual, Practice in Preschool Education. The teachers were responsible for monitoring a child's fatigue level and to encourage rest--even in the form of playing quietly--when needed.
#196-233 Dr. Amy Daniels
1876 - 1965

In 1918, when Dr. Amy Daniels accepted the position of Research Professor in the Nutrition Division at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, she was the second staff person hired for the Station--the first being the director. Daniels was jointly appointed to the University of Iowa College of Medicine faculty, then over 90% male. Originally from Massachusetts, Daniels had been one of the first women admitted to M.I.T. She completed her undergraduate work at Columbia University in 1906. Six years later she became the first woman to receive a PhD in physiology and physiological chemistry from Yale University, one of the first institutions in the United States to offer the Doctor of Philosophy degree to women at the end of the nineteenth century. Before becoming Research Professor of Nutrition at Iowa, she held teaching positions at the University of Missouri and the University of Wisconsin. In the first half of this century women participated in virtually all areas of the pure and applied sciences. They were found predominantly in the fields of botany, zoology, and psychology, and especially in home economics and nutrition. Although the number of institutions employing women faculty doubled between 1921 and 1938, most institutions included only one or two women on their faculty to represent the schools of home economics and nutrition; the greatest employers of women in science were the women's colleges.

43. Dr. Amy Daniels 1876-1965

The ICWRS provided Daniels with an opportunity to pursue not only her pure research interests in biochemistry but also their application to problems of child, infant and parent nutrition. Daniels published fourteen articles within the first two years of her appointment alone. She conducted research in nutrition as it related to children's growth and development and to the prevention of their diseases. In 1938 Daniels became the first recipient of the Borden Award for her research on milk and milk products.

According to Dr. Ruth Updegraff, a colleague at the Station, Daniels was "very dedicated to her profession and extremely scientific in relation to it." She confronted many obstacles which frequently blocked her from meeting the standards she set for herself. As early as 1920, due to "the great difficulty in finding adequate living quarters in Iowa City, and the very great delay in completing the laboratory in the Children's Hospital, as well as many other minor disturbances" (she stated in a letter to President Jessup), she strongly considered taking a position offered to her at the Southern Branch of the University of California. Although she ultimately stayed at the Research Station, in 1925 she submitted a letter of resignation to Bird T. Baldwin, the Director of the Station: "I am not willing to remain any longer an unwelcome guest in an institution in which I am expected to build up a department," she stated. Daniels referred to the understaffing, inadequate facilities and budget, poor equipment, and an insufficient patient population for her research in infant nutrition.

44. Milk Room 1919

45. May 6, 1925 Hampered by insufficient funding, facilities and staff, Amy Daniels submitted this first letter of resignation. Amy Daniels, Faculty file, University of Iowa Archives

46. Daily Iowan July 3, 1938

Baldwin and the President of the University convinced her to stay, but her professional situation did not improve. The research at the Station had been supported since 1918 by a Laura Spelman Rockefeller grant, with the understanding that the state government would gradually assume full financial responsibility for the ongoing projects. In 1937, when the grant was discontinued, Iowa was fiscally unable to support the Research Station. The Nutrition Division suffered extreme budget and program cuts. In 1940 Daniels submitted her final resignation, explaining, "For the past two years it had been my plan to sever my connection with the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station this June. The lack of understanding and appreciation of the work of the Division together with the crippling of the projects through lack of financial support has made it seem futile to continue." She organized, reviewed, and made final corrections on her unpublished material and retired in 1941.

One of Dr. Daniels' greatest contributions was her service to the Iowa community. Not content to confine herself to the laboratory, she held a free clinic each week in which she advised parents about the nutritional requirements of their children. Dr. Ruth Updegraff remembers that "this was an exceptional opportunity that was taken up by many people...There was always a line of people waiting to see her...She did this as a community service, but she didn't say that it was...It was a down-to-earth interest."

Daniels died in Iowa City in 1965 after a short illness.