Horowitz, Frances Degen

Born in the Bronx, New York, Frances Degen Horowitz spent her formative years there, attending the public schools, and growing up in the context of an entirely Jewish environment and a close-knit extended family. She detailed these influences on her development in a chapter entitled “A Jewish Woman in Academic America” (Horowitz, 1988). Schooling in the Bronx gave way to the public schools of Long Beach, Long Island, when her family moved, and then, for the last 2 years of high school, at Cherry Lawn School, a coeducational, progressive boarding school in Darien, Connecticut. After 1 year at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, she transferred to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The years spent at Antioch, a progressive, liberal arts college with a work-study program like those at Cherry Lawn School, provided unparalleled opportunities for intellectual growth and experiences, helping to shape enduring interests in writing and inquiry as well as inspiration to live a life that would have meaningful consequences.

Following marriage to Floyd R. Horowitz, Horowitz spent 1953–1954 as a Ford Foundation Fellow in a new program at Goucher College designed to educate liberal arts majors (Horowitz majored in philosophy at Antioch) to become elementary school teachers. This 1-year program earned her a masters in education and enabled her to teach the fifth grade in Iowa City, Iowa, where Floyd was to continue his studies in Iowa's creative writing and English literature doctoral program. She enrolled in a course during a summer session at the University of Iowa and encountered Boyd McCandless, developmental [Page 548]psychologist and director of the then-famed Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. After Horowitz was rejected for the doctoral program in the University of Iowa's School of Education, McCandless invited Horowitz to enter the doctoral program in developmental psychology. With little background or undergraduate study in psychology, earning a doctoral degree during 3 years at the Iowa Child Welfare Research station proved to be a heady journey of steep learning curves and full immersion in Hull-Spence behaviorism, research design, and statistical analysis. Her dissertation, the “Incentive Value of Social Stimuli for Preschool Children,” was published in Child Development (Horowitz, 1962) and cited as one of the early studies that influenced the development of the study of peer relationships.

From Iowa the Horowitzes (now with one son) moved to Oregon, where Floyd had a position in the English department of Southern Oregon College. Despite a nepotism rule, Frances taught whenever enrollments required opening up another introductory or child psychology section, and secured a Sigma Xi grant to study anxiety, self-concept, and sociometric status in elementary school children. Nevertheless, opportunities in Oregon were clearly limited. So, in 1961, when Floyd was offered a position in the English department at the University of Kansas, the Horowitz family moved (with their two sons) to Kansas. Kansas also had a nepotism rule, but a place was made for Frances by Richard Schiefelbusch, director of the Bureau of Child Research. With support from an NIH postdoctoral fellowship, she pursued research on learning, anxiety, and reinforcement and, again, as enrollments pressed, there were teaching opportunities in psychology.

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