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Podcast: New Books in Women's History
Episode: Marga Vicedo, "Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother" (Beacon Press, 2021)
Description: 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...