Overlooked No More: Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers, Creators of a Personality Test

The test was considered fun, and in subsequent years more institutions began using it. By the 1980s, the M.B.T.I. was available in 29 languages and used in 115 countries by a wide range of businesses, academic institutions and organizations like the U.S. military, the Marriott Corporation, JetBlue and Nokia for recruiting, job placement and even pairing roommates at college.

Katharine Elizabeth Cook was born on Jan. 3, 1875, in East Lansing, Mich., to Albert and Mary (Baldwin) Cook. Her parents encouraged her to read, think broadly about the world and pursue avenues that were generally unavailable to women at the time.

At 13, Katharine entered Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), where she was one of nine women among almost 100 men. At 16, she graduated second in her class. Her father, a professor of zoology and entomology at the school, taught the then-disputed theory of evolution and passed on his iconoclastic outlook to his daughter. Katharine, who became a freelance writer for women’s magazines, often considered how to balance societal expectations of her gender with her intellectual ambitions.

She was a “woman ahead of her time, caught in a restraining net woven of sexism, cultural conditioning and her own brilliance,” Frances Wright Saunders wrote in “Katharine and Isabel: Mother’s Light, Daughter’s Journey” (1991).

In 1896, Katharine married a former classmate, Lyman Briggs, an engineer and physicist, and set aside her career aspirations in favor of domestic life.

After the birth of her daughter, Isabel McKelvey Briggs, on Oct. 18, 1897, Briggs turned her living room into a “cosmic laboratory of baby training,” Merve Emre wrote in “The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing” (2018). There she home-schooled Isabel and kept detailed records of her observations in a notebook..

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/obituaries/katharine-briggs-and-isabel-myers-overlooked.html