ABSTRACT
Evelyn Gentry was born into a farm family and grew up in the hard life on the plains of Nebraska and Colorado. In 1924 she entered the University of Colorado and majored in psychology, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1928 and a master’s degree in 1930. In 1932 she received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Some years later she moved to California to recover from tuberculosis and stayed two years in a sanitarium. In 1939 she became an adjunct faculty member at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where she taught through the extension program. While she and her second husband, Edward Hooker, a Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA, fought the anticommunist loyalty-oath issue of the 1950s, Evelyn began collecting the data that would change the psychological understanding of human sexuality. After her ground-breaking paper was presented at the American Psychological Association (APA) annual meeting in Chicago in 1955, one member of the audience commented, “What a light it shed” (Harrison & Schmiechen, 1991).
