Margaret Wooster Curti (1891–1961)

Margaret Wooster Curti was born in Silver Spring, Nebraska. She attended the University of Nebraska, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in 1913 and an M.A. in psychology in 1915. She went on to the University of Chicago, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1920.

She taught briefly at Mesa High School in Mesa, Arizona and then at Beloit College before joining the faculty of Smith College in 1922. In 1925, she married Merle Eugene Curti, an historian she had met at Beloit, with whom she had two daughters. She taught at Smith until 1937, rising to the rank of Associate Professor. She went on to be a research associate at Teachers' College at Columbia University, and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin. In 1930, she published Child Psychology, which became a widely-used college textbook for many years. She also wrote for professional journals and lectured at national conferences. In 1935 in Northampton, Massachusetts, she created one of the first successful pre-school programs for two- to five-year-olds, which quickly evolved into a lab for Smith College's child psychology classes.