Abstract
Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother is both an intimate story of a family, particularly a mother and daughter, and a big-picture international story of medical experts and their changing understandings of autism in the twentieth century. In 1958 Clara Park gave birth to her fourth and final child, a girl the family called Jessy. The white family—husband David, a physics professor, and Clara, with an MA in English literature—lived a comfortable life in western Massachusetts. Clara parented and sought to care for her daughter at a time in which medical and psychological experts adamantly believed that “children became autistic as a defense against their bad mothers” (59). By the time Park died in 2010, autism had been reconceptualized “from a mental disease to a developmental condition” due in no small part to the activism of parents such as Park and their now-adult autistic children (160).
Clara Park lived out what author Marga Vicedo characterizes as “intelligent love,” the characterization subtly raising questions about epistemology, expertise, and the production of knowledge. In seeking to understand and better parent her autistic daughter, Park read widely, consulted with various experts, took extensive notes, and then sought to share her gained knowledge with the medical experts from whom she and David sought assistance. For such experts, however, their scientific knowledge was objective and accurate; parental (particularly maternal) analysis, subjective and highly questionable. Scientists interpreted Park's effort to share her maternal experience and knowledge as evidence of a maternally bereft, cold intellectual approach to motherhood—bad mothering that had driven Jessy to autism. For example, in 1962, a clinic had husband David meet with the doctor while mother Clara met with a social worker, which Clara experienced as dismissive and unfriendly. Vicedo rightly considers Park's assertions an early feminist critique of science, in which Clara insisted she could be both an intelligent and a loving mother. In essence, that she could produce knowledge while loving her child with intelligent love.
Vicedo makes clear mother blame was at the core of science regarding autism. She rightly characterizes Bruno Bettelheim's 1967 The Empty Fortress as “the best known exponent of mother blame in the history of autism” (139). His work built on that of Chaskel Leib Kanner, whose 1948 work coined the term “refrigerator mothers,” “cold perfectionist” mothers who emotionally froze their children into autism (57). The overly emotive, loving mother rendered her sons gay; the overly distant and intelligent mother rendered her children autistic. Park dismissed Bettelheim's work as “theoretically worthless” (142), but at least in Vicedo's portrayal, went no further. The incredible pressure physicians and other experts exerted on parents of children with cognitive and developmental disabilities to either institutionalize or simply let their infants die, and the extensive maternal blame surrounding autism, must have caused tremendous emotional pain for parents—and particularly mothers—and shaped internal and extended family relationships. (For more on this, I suggest the 2003 POV film “Refrigerator Mothers.”) One understands Park's presumed desire to render that emotional pain invisible, even more so as scientists already dismissed her blend of maternal love and intelligence as destructive to family and child.
This is a story of misogyny. Medical professionals enacted misogyny in the name of diagnosis, treatment, and authority. Park unmasked this misogyny and offered a corrective by insisting that parenting, and her motherhood, had authority of its own; rejecting the pathologization of motherhood. Vicedo gestures towards this analysis, but avoids a direct confrontation. Vicedo leaves space for future scholarly work about the ways by which families, and particularly mothers, live alongside sometimes-hostile medical intervention in, about, and because of their families.
White male doctors frequently disavowed their personal ties to autistic people, illustrating the forces of ableism and misogyny that undergirded their definitions of professionalism. Dr. Bernard Rimland, for example, the father of an autistic son, wrote extensively on autism but never mentioned his autistic son, believing that “[d]isplaying his very personal stake would have undermined his credibility as an object researcher” (95). Park instead claimed both motherhood and intellectual legitimacy, love and analysis. Another contrast is Park's collaboration psychotherapist Dr. Marie Battle Singer. Singer, the first expert scientist “with whom Clara worked as an equal” (85), was both female and African American, raising the possibility that her experience of oppression shaped her scientific practices. Furthermore, these contrasts suggest that masculine, racist, and elitist definitions of knowledge undermined people with disabilities and harmed families. Intelligent Lives could be strengthened by a more rigorous consideration of how racism, ableism, and misogyny combined to shape knowledge, scientific practices, and family life.
As portrayed in Intelligent Love, the shared, relational, and overlapping experiences of disability marked all members of the Park family. The relationship between the autistic daughter and her kin, and they with her, generated possibilities for sustaining and maintaining the entire family. For example, in the early 1970s, Jessy and her parents began to enter into “contracts” regarding behavior, rewards, and goals. This worked well, and during the summer of 1973, the family decided to extend this practice to all of them. Each family member entered into a unique behavioral contract, with goals such as eliminating swearing, trying new foods, or avoiding verbal tics. All family members benefitted from, and experienced, what experts had assigned only to Jessy. This example changes our understanding of autism, autistic people, non-autistic people, and turns upside down scientific claims that the presence of autism destroys family life and family relationships.
Intelligent Lives broadens the historiography of the disability rights movement by emphasizing its familial nature and grounding. Vicedo argues that parent activism from Clara Park and others radically altered scientific study of autism and rightly, but lightly, inserts this activism within the larger framework of parent and disability activism. Parents, and particularly mothers, played “an instrumental role” in rejecting and debunking the scientific claim that “autism was a willful retreat” of children from bad mothers (214). Parents depended on one another, pushing for educational changes, employment training, and the self-determination of their autistic children. Parents created new and legitimate knowledge; and, as autistic children grew to be adult, many of those adults became knowledge generators and activists.
Many readers will want Vicedo to address the issue of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) much more directly than is done in Intelligent Lives. ABA is a highly controversial practice criticized by autistic activists and the larger neurodiversity movement as violent and abusive. Vicedo is eager to indicate that the “the program the Park family had developed departed significantly from the standard view of ABA as an intensive program of behavior modification imposed by an external authority” (170). Vicedo argues that the Park family “transformed ABA into a tool that gave equal agency to Jessy” (214). This raises questions about how families interact with scientific expertise; and specifically, in this case, in a very specific historical moment of transition regarding autism. Historians of the family, and those in the neurodiversity movement, would gain from an explicit analysis and statement of why the Park family “departed significantly” from standard ABA practices.
More broadly, a deeper disability analysis by Vicedo and future historians could reframe and generate productive scholarship on the family. This book indicates but leaves unstated the suggestion that scientifically generated ableist ideologies were central to twentieth-century US familial norms. As scholars, we can dig further with a disability analysis and generate new questions about the history of the family. Helpful in this process is existing scholarship such as that by Allison C. Carey on the twentieth-century families of those with developmental disabilities; Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Jen Cellio's edited collection Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge (2011); and the explosion of materials by individuals who claim a neurodiverse or autistic identity.
A generative piece of scholarship, Intelligent Love prompts an additional number of questions from which historians of the family may benefit. How have non-privileged families made their own through, and resisted, or drowned in, the labyrinth of weighty medical and scientific expertise? How have non-normative families waded through the powerful influences of medicine and expertise? How does the history of the family overlap with that of disability, foster care, and adoption?
Intellegent Love will enrich scholars and courses on the history of the family, medicine, education, and science. Vicedo explains highly scientific arguments in accessible language without overly simplifying them, making it a readable and teachable book.