A Feminist Inquiry into the Nature of Creativity: A Case Study of Alice Bartlett Woolf

Author

Susan Lucinda Woolf Schulte

Publication Date

12-14-2002

Abstract

I did a case study of my mother because she was the most creative person I had ever known. However as I began my doctoral studies in creativity, I felt a lack, a gap, a large deficiency in the theories about, and descriptions of creative people. Wallace and Gruber, Howard Gardner, Feldman and Csikszentmihalyi studied creative people. Even though some of these people were very famous, I still thought I was not seeing a match for my mother's type of creativity. It was only when I began to read Feminist writers such as Judy Chicago, Carolyn Heilbrun and Catherine Bateson that I began to understand why. Almost all the examples of "creative" people were male, usually white, and usually with access to power. In many, many discussions of women trying to be true to their own creative core (in Feminist writings) I saw my mother's "desperate improvisation" as Bateson called it. After my mother died, I studied and described her art, poetry and writings and told of the circumstances (both historical and personal) surrounding the making of them. I tied this personal case study to emerging socio-cultural theories of creativity. It became increasingly difficult to handle all the unwieldy and unorganized material. During the course of my studies I created a "Mind Model", a visual representation looking like the gem cut known as a "brilliant". This model unified and brought into organic relationships many theories of the human brain/mind such as the split brain, the multiple intelligences of Gardner, and the physiology of the brain. It also shows how the individual mind is embedded in a cultural context. Finally, when applying this same model to all the writers and researchers in the field of creativity, (as presented in The Handbook of Creativity by Robert Sternberg,) I noted how they fit onto this template. Because of this, all the dissonant, disconnected writers, thinkers, doers, and researchers came into organic relationship within the field of creativity, and become interrelated. From a small case study, using art, poetry, writings, letters and interviews, I gathered many theories to test and apply to my mother's life. In doing this I had to invent an organizing framework, which I call my Mind Model. The Mind Model proved useful also in organizing the field of creativity. I concluded, as have many other writers in this field, that "creativity" may be the ultimate in complex behavior in the human being. Because of this, there will always be unexplained enigmas. The study of human creativity, no matter what field it starts from, may yet prove to be the most irresistible yet elusive study of them all.

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Studies

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies

First Committee Member (Chair)

Kathryn Herr

Second Committee Member

Quincy Spurlin

Third Committee Member

Steven Preskill

Fourth Committee Member

Vera John-Steiner

Recommended Citation

Woolf Schulte, Susan Lucinda. "A Feminist Inquiry into the Nature of Creativity: A Case Study of Alice Bartlett Woolf." (2002). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/educ_llss_etds/155