The Schooling of Women: Maternal Behavior and Child Environments

Beatrice Whiting was a member of the first generation of graduate students to be trained in psychological anthropology, and she has always presumed a broad range of connections between psychological and social processes. She salvaged the Six Cultures Study through an ecological analysis of its child-observation material, and she stimulated further studies, using quantitative and qualitative methods, of the ways in which broad categories like sex, age, and education influence child development. This article presents in overview a cross-cultural research program on the effects of women's schooling that was influenced by her ideas.