Karin Stephen (née Costelloe; 10 March 1889 – 12 December 1953) was a British psychoanalyst and psychologist.
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Early life and education
Karin Stephen was born Catherine Elizabeth Costelloe. Her mother, Mary Costelloe (born Mary Whitall Smith) (better known as Mary Berenson; 1864–1945) had been a Philadelphia Quaker, and her father, Benjamin Francis Conn Costelloe (1855–1899) a Northern Irish convert to Roman Catholicism. The relationship between her parents was difficult, and her mother left her husband when Karin and her sister Rachel were very young. Her father died in 1899 when she was ten years old, so the sisters were then looked after by their grandmother. While at boarding school she won a scholarship for Newnham College, Cambridge.
Stephen went up to Newnham in 1907 but left after one year, due to various personal and health problems. She then spent a year at Bryn Mawr College where she began to study philosophy and psychology. In 1909 she returned to Newnham and received a First class degree in Moral Sciences in 1910. In 1914 she became a Fellow at Newnham.
Career
In 1913 she and three other women started an unsuccessful legal action, known as Bebb vs. the Law Society, claiming that the Law Society should be compelled to admit them to its preliminary examinations. The three other women were Gwyneth Bebb, who the action was named after, Maud Crofts, and Lucy Nettlefold.