Evelyn Hooker Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Evelyn Hooker - Essay Example was that gays and lesbians are essentially maladjusted persons who need the help of society to be re-integrated and to have normal lives like most people. Her personal and professional life was influenced to a big extent by her mentor with name of Prof. Karl Muenzinger who encouraged her to pursue further studies on behaviorism, in particular the sub-topic of homosexuality. Her interest in this particular subject was due to her making friends with one of her students (name was Mr. Sam From) who was homosexual and challenged her to study him and other homosexuals to disprove commonly-held notions. Her various experiments disproved homosexuals as socially maladjusted people; her studies in effect showed this group to be well adjusted socially no different from the general population. Her studies were used by the gay rights movement to promote their own advocacies. Her personal life starting from her high school years, through college, to the masters program and eventually, the doctorate program influenced her research work because she saw all these as a way to get out of poverty and the drudgery of house work. She was quite lucky to be acquainted with professors who encouraged her to do groundbreaking research work but by her own admission, she did the research more out of curiosity and empathy. Her anonymous fellowship for a year of study in Europe gave her valuable insights to the events happening there at that time, specifically the persecution of the Jewish people at the hands of Hitler and Nazi Germany. She further traveled to Russia at around this time also and saw with her own eyes and through direct experience social injustices such as the rampant and overt discrimination against certain ethnic minorities. This gave her impetus to focus her studies on clinical psychology which gave birth to her almost exclusive concentration on the study of homosexuality in which this group of people are discriminated against as deviants. A turning point in her career