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Title details for Intelligent Love by Marga Vicedo - Available

Intelligent Love

The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother

by Marga Vicedo
Amara Jasper
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 23, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780807025673
      • File size: 257973 KB
      • Duration: 08:57:26

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Booklist

      February 15, 2021
      Don't blame the moms. In this thoroughly researched and reported history of autism, Vicedo recounts the remarkable contributions of parents, particularly Clara Claiborne Park. After white male psychiatrists and psychoanalysts incorrectly and cruelly called women like her refrigerator mothers, whose coldness caused their children's condition, Park wrote a groundbreaking memoir in 1967 documenting her journey with her then nine-year-old daughter. In telling the story of how she fought to get support for Jessica, her fourth child with her physicist husband, the Radcliffe-educated writer empowered other parents. Vicedo, who holds doctorates in philosophy and the history of science, brings up important questions about what's normal. Once considered a symptom of mental illness, autism is now seen as a form of neurodiversity, not a disease. Vicedo notes that it's problematic that much of what's known still relies on so-called WEIRD subjects, individuals in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries. Expect to boo for the mother-blamers and to cheer for the entire Park family, especially Clara, who died a decade ago, and Jessica, now a mail clerk at Williams College and an artist.

      COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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