Here are collected biographical sketches of Martha Guernsey Colby. I was fortunate to live some years of my life in the Ann Arbor house she and her husband Walter Colby had designed and moved into in 1933. This post seeks to document Martha Colby's life and legacy, including her pioneering career on the University of Michigan faculty.
My research of Oswald Veblen, for whom this website is named, eventually led to my also researching the lives and careers of the Colbys. Walter Frances Colby was a nuclear physicist whose legacy at the University of Michigan physics department paralleled in many ways Veblen's impact on mathematics at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study.
My life has been profoundly influenced not directly by their careers but by the houses these two scholars left behind, and the gardens their wives created and tended to.
The parallels between Veblen and Colby are uncanny. They were born a month apart in 1880, in small midwestern towns. Early in their careers, at the dawn of the 20th century, both made connections to European scholars that in time would greatly benefit American scholarship and national security. Both retired in 1950, and both were married to remarkable women whose stories deserve to be told.
After growing up in Idaho and Utah, Martha Guernsey became the second woman to receive a PhD from the University of Michigan. Walter Colby, an accomplished musician, helped direct her dissertation work on the psychology of music. Seven years later, in 1929, they married. The biographies collected below document her pioneering career at UofM in psychology, prizes awarded, her studies of child development and music perception, and her ultimate decision to sacrifice her career to support Walter in his service to the country. Until she died tragically on one of their travels in Europe, she shared with Walter "a deep interest in science, music, literature, languages, and plain dirt gardening."
My parents bought the Colby house from Walter's estate in 1970. The music room and beautiful garden helped feed my life-long passion for music and plants. The least I can do in return is to make their lives and legacies known to the world.
1) Below is a profile of Martha Colby in Psychology's Feminist Voices
https://feministvoices.com/profiles/martha-guernsey-colby
Martha Guernsey Colby
Birth: 1899
Death: 1952
Training Location(s):
PhD, University of Michigan (1922)
Primary Affiliation(s):
University of Michigan (1921-1950)
Other Media:
Archival Collection
Walter F. Colby papers. Call no. 8597 Aa 2. Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.
Career Focus: Child development; music perception
Biography
Martha Guernsey Colby was born February 22, 1899. After graduating from high school in Montpelier, Idaho, at the age of fifteen she spent one year each at the University of Utah and at the University of Michigan. The following year she moved to Ogden, Utah, where she taught elementary school and music. She then returned to the University of Michigan for graduate studies, during which time she was an assistant in experimental psychology at the university. Her mentor was a former student of E. B. Titchener's, theoretician and historian W. B. Pillsbury. Colby obtained her doctoral degree from the University of Michigan in 1922, only the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree from the university.
Following the completion of her graduate studies, Colby married physicist Walter F. Colby, who became a professor at the University of Michigan. Colby remained at the University of Michigan, alongside her husband, as assistant professor of social science research from 1921 until 1950. Over the course of her career, her psychological research was in the area of child development, first on musical ability and later on social attitudes toward exceptional children.
During her time at the University of Michigan, Colby also spent time abroad, holding fellowships at the University of Vienna from 1927 to 1928 and from 1929 to 1930, the latter position made possible through a Laura Spelman Rockefeller fellowship. These fellowships allowed her to conduct research at the Institute of Psychology in Vienna and to become friends with Karl and Charlotte Bühler. While abroad Colby also worked with the gestaltists Köhler and Wertheimer in Berlin.
Colby's career in psychology came to an end when she resigned from the University of Michigan in 1950, to accompany her husband to Washington, DC where he had accepted a position at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). In 1952, the couple travelled to Europe for Walter Colby's work with the AEC. While driving on a mountain road in Greece the couple's car went off the road, killing Martha Guernsey Colby.
by Jacy L. Young (2010)
Selected Works
By Martha Guernsey Colby
Colby, M. G. (1935). Instrumental reproduction of melody by preschool children. Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology, 47, 413-430.
Colby, M. G. (1944). The early development of social attitudes toward exceptional children. Pedagogical Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology, 64, 105-110.
Guernsey, M. (1928). The role of consonance and dissonance in music. American Journal of Psychology, 40, 173-204.
About Martha Guernsey Colby
Colby, Martha Guernsey (1899-1952). (2000). In M. B. Ogilvie, & J. D. Harvey (Eds.), The biographical dictionary of women in science: Pioneering lives from ancient times to the mid-20th century (vol. 1, pp. 279). New York: Routledge.
2) This biographical sketch was found on Find a Grave
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/118649701/martha-colby
Married Walter Colby 11 Apr 1929 in Washtenaw Co., Michigan.
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MARTHA GUERNSEY COLBY, '19, Ph.D.'22, Associate Professor of Psychology, is, like all her colleagues, deeply concerned about the future of liberal education and the teaching profession. She believes that a teacher must have character as well as cleverness, and an exceptionally broad and thorough groundwork before specialization. Although she is very quiet by nature, her recent vigorous writings on fundamental education problems have brought her national recognition.
A westerner by birth and early education, Dr. Colby entered the University of Utah as a freshman. There she won the annual literary prize by an essay called "Old Clothes," and decided to become a writer. Shortly afterward, a fugue entitled "In Defiance of Richter's Manual of Harmony" won a conservatory award, and she decided to become a musician. But her first week as a sophomore in the biological and psychological laboratories at Michigan changed the course of her career.
As a faculty advisor, she retains a first-hand sympathy with student problems of specialization and "liberal" balance. Dr. Colby's early interests survived as a vocations. In college she wrote music for the Junior Girls' Play, was Woman's Editor of the Michigan Daily, the Michiganensian, and the campus literary magazine, Chimes. She was a member of Chi Omega, Sigma Alpha Iota, Mortarboard, Stylus, and Sigma Xi. As a graduate student, she held three University of Michigan fellowships, and her dissertation was awarded the Solis prize.
In 1926-27 she studied in Vienna on a Social Science Research Fellowship, and in 1929 was awarded the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fellowship for further study abroad. At various other periods she has travelled extensively with her husband, spending fifteen months of 1936-37 in the Orient and Near East.
Professor Colby is the author of several scientific contributions, and a member of various national and local professional organizations. As President of the Women's Research Club in 1941, and of the Women of the University of Michigan Faculty in 1942, she was active in efforts to coordinate these organizations with war work, both national and local. She is a member of the Women's War Committee of the University, and a Red Cross instructor for college classes in First Aid.
She is married to Walter Francis Colby, Professor of Physics, with whom she shares a deep interest in science, music, literature, languages, and plain dirt gardening.
From The Michigan Alumnus 309.
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Former University Professor of Psychology was killed in an automobile accident near Athens, Greece. Her husband, Professor Emeritus Walter Colby, miraculously escaped death and returned to Ann Arbor after a stay in the hospital
From the Michigan Alumnus, 7 June 1958, p. 354
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Initial death location from FG contributor Deborah M Colby 1 Aug 2017.
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Corrected death location from FG contributor Ronald Colby 23 Dec 2018.
3) In a group of 14 biographical sketches of faculty members in psychology from 1897 to 1945, Martha Colby appears to be the only woman included.
https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/psychassets/psychdocuments/VolumeIITEXTONLY.pdf
PSYCHOLOGY AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN:
VOLUME II
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF
FACULTY MEMBERS SERVING
ON THE STAFF DURING THE
YEARS 1897-1945
ALFRED C. RAPHELSON
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN FLINT COLLEGE
1968
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Martha Guernsey Colby
(1899-1952)
Martha Guernsey Colby was born on February 22, 1899, in Montpelier, Idaho. The
family moved to Ogden, Utah where Colby attended public school, graduating at the age of 15 in
1914. The following fall she entered the University of Utah and stayed to complete her freshman
year. The near year she transferred to Ann Arbor. After completing her sophomore year, Colby
withdrew again to accept a position in Ogden as a primary grade teacher and public school music
supervisor. She returned to Ann Arbor the next year (1917-1918) and remained to complete her
A.B. (1919), A.M. (1920), and PhD (1922) degrees.
Colby was very closely attached to Professor Pillsbury and during the twenties and
thirties was certainly the most devoted disciple the senior professor had. Her dissertation, “A
Study of Liminal Intensity and the Application of Weber’s Law to Tones of Different Pitch” was
directed by Pillsbury. During this time, he was personally very seldom involved in research and,
not being very handy with apparatus, had nothing to do with equipment. He made an exception,
however, in Colby’s case and actually helped construct the apparatus she used in her data
collection. The research won Colby the Sales Dissertation Prize.
Colby appears to have had a very great amount of respect for Pillsbury and was very
defensive about him whenever any criticism of the senior man was made. Her feelings for him
seem to have centered around his characteristic culture and dignity rather than his intellectual
traits. She accepted very little of his psychology.
In the spring of 1927, Colby was awarded a Social Science Research Council fellowship
to study abroad. She intended to stay in Berlin in order to study with the Gestaltists but the
impersonality of the German professors annoyed her. She then went to Vienna and spent the year
with Karl and Charlotte Buhler working on the problems of rhythm, melody, and space
perception in children.
On several other occasions, Colby traveled to Europe to study. In 1929-1930, she
received a Laura Spellman Rockefeller Traveling fellowship to continue her work in Vienna. The
next year found her in Munich and Berlin for a semester at each place. In 1936 she again returned
to Vienna on a semester sabbatical leave.
Colby (nee Guernsey) married Walter F. Colby on May 11, 1929. Walter Colby, a
professor in the Department of Physics, had been involved in the direction of her dissertation and
evidently the experience had been so satisfactory for both of them that a friendship resulted that
led to their marriage seven years later. Professor Colby was a very distinguished physicist who
had been on the Michigan faculty since 1907. He was nineteen years older than his wife. From
the time of their marriage, Martha Colby served in the department on a part-time basis.
During the 1920s, her major teaching assignment was in the introductory courses
although she did take over the course in genetic psychology after Dr. Dimmick left. She
developed the latter course into a regular two semester offering. In later years, she introduced
courses in the psychology of music, psychology of social work, and the psychology of social
Psychology at the University of Michigan: Volume II, Biographical Sketches 76
service workers. Her bibliography was modest and contained items which tended to be in the area
of genetic psychology and the psychology of music. She began a book on the former topic and
made some progress on it but never completed it. She also spent almost four years working on the
speech problems of an aphasic patient whom she helped make a remarkable recovery. Colby
received promotions to assistant professor in 1929 and associate professor in 1937.
During the years following the Second World War, a series of events occurred which
ultimately led to Colby’s resignation from the department. Walter Colby had been intimately
involved in atomic energy research during the war years. In the spring of 1948, he was called to
Washington to work in the Atomic Energy Commission on the important organizational task for
the commission’s involvement in developing the nation’s atomic energy research. Walter Colby
was then sixty-eight years old, and both he and his wife were not happy with the prospect of his
living alone in Washington. As Martha Colby put it in a letter to Dr. Marquis,
. . . the tasks he faces seem to be very difficult and delicate and
fatiguing. I do not inquire into their nature, but see the very real
evidences of tension and strain and the long hours work. The
release for my husband, as for myself, is in our evenings at the
piano or with our books around the fireside or our simple suppers
shared in peace and quiet. I’m afraid it is just these very simple
things which he will miss and they do not make a very
impressive evidence to present to University officials.37
Colby remained in Ann Arbor during the spring and summer of 1948, and then received a
leave of absence without pay for the fall. She agreed to teach the spring term of 1949 and it was
arranged for her to offer a full assignment (genetic psychology, psychology of music, advanced
genetic psychology). The department did not find it possible to arrange a schedule that allowed
her a workable commuting arrangement between Ann Arbor and Washington so that from the
Colbys’ point of view it was not a very satisfactory situation.
In April 1949, Colby submitted her resignation but it was withdrawn four days later. But
as the fall term drew near and the prospects of another separation grew imminent, the decision to
resign grew firm. On December 19, 1949, Colby submitted her final resignation and concluded as
follows
. .
. . . Many people in the A.E.C. have come to see me, without any
knowledge of this to Walter. They would like him to stay on
indefinitely, or at least until summer. They are convinced, quite
rightly, that he will not stay here longer alone. In his heart, he
prefers the quiet laboratory of Professor Randall in Ann Arbor;
in his mind, he feels there are two “hard jobs” to finish up for his
country and his commission. So you see, he too, is torn. We shall
have quite a job, each to comfort the decision of each other.38
Colby’s resignation became effective at the end of the fall term, 1949-1950. Professor
Walter Colby’s work with the Atomic Energy Commission was completed by the summer of 1952. As a “last service” to the commission, the Colbys were sent to Europe on an assignment
which would require the physicist to inspect some physics laboratories in Europe. The trip would
also provide them with their first post-war opportunity to tour the Europe they both loved so
much.
While being driven through the mountains of Greece, their driver swerved to avoid
hitting a goat and the car went over an embankment. Walter Colby was severely injured but
recovered. Dr. Martha Guernsey Colby was killed.
37 Letter from Martha G. Colby to Dr. Donald G. Marquis, January 2, 1948 in the Martha G. Colby File, Department of Psychology.
38 Letter from Martha G. Colby to Dr. Donald G. Marquis, December 19, 1949, in the Martha G. Colby File, Department of Psychology. Psychology at the University of Michigan: Volume II, Biographical Sketches 77
This 1958 article tells of Martha Colby's tragic death in Italy, and says she had been on the faculty from 1925 to 50. https://aadl.org/taxonomy/term/125158
2001- 2012 Sidonie Smith was Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English and Women’s Studies
Dr. Sidonie Smith is Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, and President of the Modern Language Association of America.
