Bronner, Augusta Fox (1881–1966)

Trained as a psychologist, Augusta Fox Bronner is remembered for her research on juvenile delinquency and her development of treatment programs for troubled children. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, to a Jewish family, her parents encouraged her to pursue a professional career.

Bronner assisted noted educational psychologist Edward L. Thorndyke through the course of her graduate career at Columbia University Teachers College. Her dissertation, A Comparative Study of the Intelligence of Delinquent Girls, published in 1914, was an original application of mental testing to the questions of juvenile crime. Through this research, Bronner showed that there was no correlation between retardation and delinquency, which challenged the conventional wisdom that assumed inherited biological causes for delinquency and crime. Bronner's study had great influence on theory development, research, and programming for youth in the first half of the 20th century.

In 1913, Augusta Bronner attended a summer course at Harvard University taught by the distinguished Chicago neurologist William Healy, who had developed the individual case approach for counseling and youth treatment programs. As a result of that summer experience, Bronner was hired by Healy as a psychologist at the Chicago Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, which he headed. Together they continued to develop the clinical method of studying and treating juvenile delinquency. They taught that heredity was a minor factor as a cause of social deviance but that mental repressions, social conflicts, and family relations were serious causes of youth crime and deviance.

In 1914, when grant funding ran out for the institute in Chicago, Cook County overtook the funding. The county desired only diagnoses from the institute. Bronner and Healy found themselves increasingly frustrated with their work in Chicago as diagnosing became the chief task of the institute, leaving little time to carry out, and no money to fund, research and treatment. So Bronner sought funding from philanthropists in Boston. In 1917, the Judge Baker Foundation was established, with Healy as its director and Bronner as assistant director. The Judge Baker Guidance Center, as the foundation was later named, became the pilot model for guidance centers and clinics across the globe.

By the 1930s, Bronner and Healy shifted the focus of their work from doing diagnoses for courts to diagnosing and treating clients. They developed the team guidance concept, in which psychologists, social workers, medical personnel, and others worked together to determine treatment programs for each individual youth in their care. They also attempted to keep the size of the clinic small to ensure individualized and personal treatment. Although Bronner's work in the guidance center during this time was to schedule conferences and supervise psychological work, she continued to do research on the causes and treatment of juvenile deviance.

After his wife's death, Healy married Bronner. Although Bronner produced a considerable portion of the research results and did her fair share of the partnership's work, she purposely remained in the shadow of Healy. Bronner published few of her own research results after becoming Healy's partner, and she emphasized her determination by destroying most of her papers and unpublished manuscripts when they retired in 1946. “Though her work is forever linked to Healy, Bronner made important contributions in the fields of mental testing, delinquency, and mental health” (Winkler, 1999:601).

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