Overview

Winner of the History of Science Society's 2022 Davis Prize How one mother challenged the medical establishment and misconceptions about autistic children and their parents In the early 1960s, Massachusetts writer and homemaker Clara Park and her husband took their 3-year-old daughter, Jessy, to a specialist after noticing that she avoided connection with others. Following the conventional wisdom of the time, the psychiatrist diagnosed Jessy with autism and blamed Clara for Jessy’s isolation. Experts claimed Clara was the prototypical “refrigerator mother,” a cold, intellectual parent who starved her children of the natural affection they needed to develop properly. Refusing to accept this, Clara decided to document her daughter’s behaviors and the family’s engagement with her. In 1967, she published her groundbreaking memoir challenging the refrigerator mother theory and carefully documenting Jessy’s development. Clara’s insights and advocacy encouraged other parents to seek education and support for their autistic children. Meanwhile, Jessy would work hard to expand her mother’s world, and ours. Drawing on previously unexamined archival sources and firsthand interviews, science historian Marga Vicedo illuminates the story of how Clara Park and other parents fought against medical and popular attitudes toward autism while presenting a rich account of major scientific developments in the history of autism in the US. Intelligent Love is a fierce defense of a mother’s right to love intelligently, the value of parents’ firsthand knowledge about their children, and an individual’s right to be valued by society.

Full Product Details

9780807025628

Table of Contents

Reviews

Intelligent Love is a history of autism told through the eyes of the mother of a child diagnosed as 'autistic' in mid-twentieth-century middle-class America. Vicedo's compelling subject is the tension, even incompatibility, between maternal love and scientific reason that plagues the history of autism. This book is a vehicle for exploring profound questions about the meaning of love, intelligence, and disability in our cultural history. --Evelyn Fox Keller, professor emerita, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of Making Sense of Life Intelligent Love is a vital book that illustrates the complex and unsettling history of persecution that autistic people and their families have suffered through the ages. Readers will journey from a time when an autistic diagnosis was perceived as a devastation to now, when the neurodiversity movement and the voices of autistic people themselves are finally beginning to drown out the negative medicalized model so long perceived as the norm. Read it, you won't be disappointed. --Emma Dalmayne, CEO of Autistic Inclusive Meets and author of It's an Autism Thing . . . I'll Help You Understand It Through her engaging reconstruction of the fascinating relationship of Clara Park and her daughter Jessy, Marga Vicedo reveals not only how science affects life but how lives affect science. In the process, she invites us to break down the harmful dichotomies that set ability against disability, good mothers against bad mothers, and logic against love. A compelling and compassionate read. --Alexandra Rutherford, professor of psychology, York University, Toronto With sensitivity, Marga Vicedo captures the fierce determination Clara Park brought to her writings and activism that helped reorient diagnoses that targeted mothers as agents of their children's so-called inadequate psychological development and that inspired parents of other autistic children. --Rima D. Apple, author of Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America In Intelligent Love, Marga Vicedo describes the intriguing story behind Clara Park's groundbreaking two-book series, which challenged the medical establishment and highlighted the flawed, yet popularly held, beliefs around autism. By exploring Park's experience with her daughter's autism diagnosis, Vicedo reminds us how far our understanding of autism has come. This book is a much welcome contribution to the worldwide autism literature. --Stephen M. Edelson, PhD, executive director, Autism Research Institute

Intelligent Love is a history of autism told through the eyes of the mother of a child diagnosed as 'autistic' in mid-twentieth-century middle-class America. Vicedo's compelling subject is the tension, even incompatibility, between maternal love and scientific reason that plagues the history of autism. This book is a vehicle for exploring profound questions about the meaning of love, intelligence, and disability in our cultural history. --Evelyn Fox Keller, professor emerita, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of Making Sense of Life Intelligent Love is a vital book that illustrates the complex and unsettling history of persecution that autistic people and their families have suffered through the ages. Readers will journey from a time when an autistic diagnosis was perceived as a devastation to now, when the neurodiversity movement and the voices of autistic people themselves are finally beginning to drown out the negative medicalized model so long perceived as the norm. Read it, you won't be disappointed. --Emma Dalmayne, CEO of Autistic Inclusive Meets and author of It's an Autism Thing . . . I'll Help You Understand It Through her engaging reconstruction of the fascinating relationship of Clara Park and her daughter Jessy, Marga Vicedo reveals not only how science affects life but how lives affect science. In the process, she invites us to break down the harmful dichotomies that set ability against disability, good mothers against bad mothers, and logic against love. A compelling and compassionate read. --Alexandra Rutherford, professor of psychology, York University, Toronto With sensitivity, Marga Vicedo captures the fierce determination Clara Park brought to her writings and activism that helped reorient diagnoses that targeted mothers as agents of their children's so-called inadequate psychological development and that inspired parents of other autistic children. --Rima D. Apple, author of Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America In Intelligent Love, Marga Vicedo describes the intriguing story behind Clara Park's groundbreaking two-book series, which challenged the medical establishment and highlighted the flawed, yet popularly held, beliefs around autism. By exploring Park's experience with her daughter's autism diagnosis, Vicedo reminds us how far our understanding of autism has come. This book is a much welcome contribution to the worldwide autism literature. --Stephen M. Edelson, PhD, executive director, Autism Research Institute What singles out this book as a literary and intellectual tour de force is its deft weave between being a broad social-intellectual history of psychiatry and the personal story of Jessy, an autistic child growing into adulthood, and her mother, Clara Park, who worked, wrote, and advocated mightily for her daughter and others like her. Anyone interested in autism will find this superb book tremendously compelling--and for those outside it, a model of how we have thought and how we ought to think about disability, medicine, psychiatry, and the family. --Peter Galison, author of Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps

Intelligent Love is a history of autism told through the eyes of the mother of a child diagnosed as 'autistic' in mid-twentieth-century middle-class America. Vicedo's compelling subject is the tension, even incompatibility, between maternal love and scientific reason that plagues the history of autism. This book is a vehicle for exploring profound questions about the meaning of love, intelligence, and disability in our cultural history. --Evelyn Fox Keller, professor emerita, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of Making Sense of Life Intelligent Love is a vital book that illustrates the complex and unsettling history of persecution that autistic people and their families have suffered through the ages. Readers will journey from a time when an autistic diagnosis was perceived as a devastation to now, when the neurodiversity movement and the voices of autistic people themselves are finally beginning to drown out the negative medicalized model so long perceived as the norm. Read it, you won't be disappointed. --Emma Dalmayne, CEO of Autistic Inclusive Meets and author of It's an Autism Thing . . . I'll Help You Understand It

Author Information

Marga Vicedo, PhD, is a philosopher and historian of science. She is a professor at the University of Toronto, where she teaches and writes about the history of biology, psychology, and psychiatry since the turn of the twentieth century. She is on the editorial board of numerous journals, including the Review of General Psychology and Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, and is the author of The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available