Ruth Sherman Tolman

Life

Tolman was born in Indiana on 9 October 1893. Not much is known about her early life. For college, she went to University of California Los Angeles. At the University of California she studied psychology. During her graduate studies, also at UCLA, she studied how different groups of criminals varied psychologically. This is where she met her husband, Richard Tolman, the dean of the school at the time. Richard Tolman also served as vice chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, and the scientific advisor of the Manhattan Project. They married in 1924 when she was thirty years old.

Career

During her career, Tolman was a prominent figure in the psychology field and the field of clinical psychology. After she received her doctorate, she carried on to be the senior psychological examiner for the Los Angeles County Probation Department. Having graduated at the University of California, she started her to begin her fulfillment of academic accomplishments. Whilst writing six books, helping to create an early treatment of PTSD, she was also the first woman ever to be elected to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). There was much controversy with her being elected due to the fact that Richard's brother was the creator of the SPSSI.

Before the war, she was a clinical psychologist in the criminal justice system. She started working during the end of World War II, when many soldiers had suffered from PTSD, and needed some form of treatment. This greatly advanced her career and made her a noteworthy figure.

Tolman was very confident in her abilities and she did not attribute her success to her connection to her brother-in-law. She was proactive in helping other women achieve the same goals as she had. She served on the committee called the Service of Women Psychologists in the Emergency Committee on Psychology (ECP). The purpose was to help prepare the women psychologist to fill the role of the male psychologist while they were at war and to help address the discrimination felt by the female psychologists.

She went on to hold many more important roles in her field. During the war, Tolman was being hired by government agencies that were hiring psychologists. Her last assignment was her position as a clinical psychologist with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which is equivalent to the modern day CIA. This position required her to devise tests to comprehend the psychological stability of field agents. During this time, she began her affair with J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Throughout her career she held many prominent positions, and remained one of the most important and significant clinical psychologist of her time.

Personal life

Her professional life was not as well known as her personal life. Although married to Richard Chace Tolman, a well known chemist, she had an ongoing affair with his good friend, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who famously created the atomic bomb. She was ten years older than he was at the time. She bought a house in Washington during the war, where Oppenheimer often stayed when called to the capital. Her husband died of a heart attack in 1948. Some people say that he died of a broken heart. She continued her love affair with Robert. After her husband died, she returned to be a professor of clinical psychology at UCLA.

Ruth Sherman Tolman died at age sixty-four. She died in California on September 18, 1957 and was later buried in Massachusetts.