Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother (2021)
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.
...MoreReview Ellen Herman (2021) Review of "Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (pp. 295-296).
Review Sarah S. Richardson (2021) Review of "Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 602-603).
Review Hannah Zeavin (2021) Review of "Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother". Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (pp. 479-481).
Review Frank C. P. van der Horst (2022) Review of "Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 686-687).
Review Milana Aronov (2022) Review of "Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother". Canadian Journal of Health History/Revue canadienne d’histoire de la santé (pp. 218-221).
Similar Citations
Article
Dannick Rivest;
Julien Prud’homme;
(2020)
Incertitude diagnostique et action politique: Une association de parents face aux politiques de l’autisme, 1982–2017
(/isis/citation/CBB545117723/)
Book
Jessica Clements;
Kari Nixon;
(2022)
Optimal Motherhood and Other Lies Facebook Told Us: Assembling the Networked Ethos of Contemporary Maternity Advice
(/isis/citation/CBB196497243/)
Book
Nora Doyle;
(2018)
Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America
(/isis/citation/CBB542736813/)
Article
Raz, Mical;
(2014)
Deprived of Touch: How Maternal and Sensory Deprivation Theory Converged in Shaping Early Debates over Autism
(/isis/citation/CBB001420216/)
Book
Sarah Knott;
(2019)
Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History
(/isis/citation/CBB569952258/)
Article
Evan, Bonnie;
(2013)
How Autism Became Autism: The Radical Transformation of a Central Concept of Child Development in Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001320315/)
Article
Chloe Silverman;
(2022)
How to read ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’
(/isis/citation/CBB861035017/)
Book
Sarah Fox;
(2022)
Giving Birth in Eighteenth-century England
(/isis/citation/CBB814819002/)
Article
Verhoeff, Berend;
(2014)
Stabilizing Autism: A Fleckian Account of the Rise of a Neurodevelopmental Spectrum Disorder
(/isis/citation/CBB001420121/)
Article
Yanara Schmacks;
(2021)
‘Only mothers can be true revolutionaries’: The Politicization of Motherhood in 1980s West German Psychoanalysis
(/isis/citation/CBB672428899/)
Thesis
Pezeshk, Banafsheh Violet;
(2001)
Etiology of autism: A critical review
(/isis/citation/CBB001560940/)
Article
Polaris Koi;
(2021)
Genetics on the neurodiversity spectrum: Genetic, phenotypic and endophenotypic continua in autism and ADHD
(/isis/citation/CBB820126370/)
Book
Sara Matthiesen;
(2021)
Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade
(/isis/citation/CBB740318677/)
Article
Patrick Kirkham;
(2017)
‘The Line Between Intervention and Abuse’ – Autism and Applied Behaviour Analysis
(/isis/citation/CBB923307084/)
Article
McKeever, Brooke Weberling;
(2013)
News Framing of Autism: Understanding Media Advocacy and the Combating Autism Act
(/isis/citation/CBB001320108/)
Book
Michelle Millar Fisher;
Amber Winick;
(2021)
Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births
(/isis/citation/CBB180815813/)
Article
Andrea Narracci;
(2019)
Scenari per il futuro della salute mentale
(/isis/citation/CBB708807900/)
Article
Jonathan Andrews;
Chris Philo;
(2017)
James Frame’s The Philosophy of Insanity (1860)
(/isis/citation/CBB313587958/)
Article
Beyer, Christof;
(2012)
Eine Patientenperspektive in der Psychiatrie zwischen Krankheit, Normalisierung und Normalität (1921--1937)
(/isis/citation/CBB001421896/)
Book
Rima Praspaliauskiene;
(2022)
Enveloped Lives: Caring and Relating in Lithuanian Health Care
(/isis/citation/CBB237202215/)
Be the first to comment!