Howe, Louisa Pinkham.

Sociologist and psychotherapist Louisa (Pinkham) Howe was born in Melrose, Mass., the daughter of suffragist Wenona (Osborne) and Henry W. Pinkham, and educated at Radcliffe College (A.B. 1937) and Harvard University (A.M. 1939, Ph.D. 1949). In 1951 Howe testified at a a hearing for the Brown v. Board of Education case that racial segregation was psychologically damaging to children. The first woman to hold the Sigmund Freud Memorial Fellowship, Howe was on the faculties of the Menninger Foundation, the University of Kansas, Lesley College, and Harvard University, where she was one of the first women appointed a teaching fellow. Long interested in the mind-body connection, and community and family systems, Howe studied pregnancy, alcoholism, and programs in community mental health, and helped to establish the College Mental Health Center in Boston. She died in Cambridge, Mass., in 1998, at the age of 82.