Global InformationCelestia Susannah Parrish information
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Celestia Susannah Parrish | |
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 Parrish circa 1898 | |
| Born | September 12, 1853 Pittsylvania County, Virginia, United States |
| Died | September 7, 1918 (aged 64) Clayton, Georgia, US |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Institutions |
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| Doctoral advisor | E. B. Titchener |
Celestia Susannah Parrish (September 12, 1853 – September 7, 1918)[1][2] was an American educator.
She was born the daughter of a plantation owner, William Perkins Parrish (1816-1863), and Lucinda Jane Walker (1828-1863), on September 12, 1853, in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. Her father was a plantation owner of moderate wealth and position. He supported her intellectual ambitions. At age 5 she attended a private school on the plantation. Her parents died during the Civil War leaving her, her younger brother, and her sister to live with their uncle and two aunts. She was orphaned by age 10 and was taken under the care of relatives[3] until her uncle's death five years later. Her uncle disapproved of girls receiving an education so she read all the books in her aunt's library. In 1865 she attended a private school in Callands, Virginia. At that point, she took up a job as a community schoolteacher to support her younger brother and her sister but struggled with her early teaching experiences.
Parrish's early life was difficult, but she was determined to support her family and to obtain an education for herself. Her guardian uncle died and her aunts refused to support her and her siblings. In 1874, she accepted a position as a teacher in Danville, Virginia which allowed her to begin taking classes at Roanoke Female College with her younger sister. She taught from 1871 to 1875. In 1876, she graduated but went on to take two more years of schooling at the Virginia State Normal School.[4]
In 1892, Parrish had gained a significant reputation for her teaching and was offered a position at the newly opened Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia as the chair of mathematics. Under this position, she was also responsible for philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology. In order to gain a better understanding of the field of psychology, she enrolled in a summer session at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York to study under the famous American psychologist E. B. Titchener. Although Titchener is known as a rigid sexist (no women were permitted to join his Society for Experimental Psychology), he did accept a number of female graduate students, including Parrish.
After Parrish returned to Randolph-Macon, Titchener initially refused to do any correspondence work with her. She begged him to change his mind, urging him that "you must help me. A man who sits down to the rich feasts which are spread before you has no right to deny a few crumbs to a poor starveling like me (Parrish, 1925, p. 3)." Titchener relented and the two eventually became good friends.
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