What contextual factors influenced the psychologist’s Eleanor Gibson's contributions?

There are several features of the context in which Eleanor Gibson worked that may have influenced her contributions. Born in 1910, she grew up and began her career in a period of substantial gender inequality. While at Yale, for example, she was not allowed to attend seminars on Freudian psychology because of her gender. Although Gibson herself downplayed the effect of this on her, it may well be that the originality of her work stemmed from from this exclusion from traditional career opportunities.
Her most important discovery, that of the visual cliff, actually stemmed from her taking a traditional female role in child rearing and using her own experiences of motherhood as a starting point for scientific inquiry. Her discovery of the "visual cliff" and subsequent work in the areas of perceptual learning and ecological theory of development reflected her own observations as a mother and eventually developed into a major set of experimental protocols for understanding how children learned to understand their surroundings.
One could argue that there are other areas in which her context influenced her. First, much of her major work was done in a period when many psychologists were moving away from traditional Freudian approaches; behavioral theories and studies influenced her work. Next, after the experience of World War II, notions of inheritable traits were somewhat tainted by Nazism; the Civil Rights movement also pushed back against the concept of biology being destiny. This led to a more receptive environment for studying children's malleability and the effect of environment on their learning and behavior. 
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eleanor-J-Gibson