The moral of her story: exploring the philosophical and religious commitments in Mary Whiton Calkins' self-psychology.

Over the course of 3 decades, from the turn of the century to the late 1920s, Mary Whiton Calkins articulated and defended a system of self-psychology that held that psychology as a field should be organized as the science of selves. Calkins' system was far from popular at the time, which leads one to question why she persisted in dedicating herself to the cause of defending it. Previous research has sought answers to this question through examination of Calkins' experience as a faculty member at Wellesley College. In this article it is additonally argued that Calkins was not prepared to abandon her system of self-psychology because it was intricately connected to her ideas about ethics and morality.