Mary Whiton Calkins was born the oldest of five children to Walcott and Charlotte Calkins in Hartford, Connecticut, March 30, 1863. Her father was a Protestant minister and her family moved numerous times due to his vocation. She spent most of her childhood in Buffalo, New York. Calkins was quite close to her family which made it difficult for her to leave home. In fact, she lived with her family in a house in Newton Massachusetts from 1880 until her death. However, in 1882 she attended Smith College. It was unusual at that time for women to go to college. At school she studied philosophy and classics. After school, she spent a year tutoring her brothers in French which granted them advanced placement in college. During this period, Calkins began a lasting involvement with social concerns such as profit sharing, women's suffrage, labor unions, and the economic and industrial problems that emerged at the end of the century. May 1886 saw the Calkins family's move to Europe where Calkins and her mother spent the winter in Leipzig while the men resided mostly in Paris. In Paris, Calkins met a Vassar College teacher named Abby Leach with whom she traveled to Italy and Greece. In the latter country, Calkins studied Greek and supplanted her knowledge of Greek classic while visiting historical centers of philosophy. After her return to the United States she was offered a job teaching Greek at Wellesley College and thus began what would become a forty year association with the school. After she had been teaching at Wellesley for a while, she told one of her colleagues about her interest in philosophy. This colleague then told the college president that Calkins should head up the newly created experimental psychology department. She was tempted to return to Europe to continue her philosophical studies but chose to remain because she had the opportunity to work with several prominent psychologists and philosophers. She created a laboratory and introduced scientific psychology into the course load at Wellesley. Some time later she worked at Harvard in the laboratory of Hugo Munsterberg . While Calkins was working with Munsterberg she did research on memory and invented what is now known as paired-associated learning technique. Because of her excellent work with Munsterberg, her Harvard professors encouraged her to get a Ph.D, but the school would not grant her one because she was a woman. Later in her career, Calkins became more and more interested in the philosophy and psychology of the self. Her studies led her to term her philosophy Absolute Personalism. Mary Whiton Calkins died February 26, 1930.