Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother by Marga Vicedo (review)

In 1948, Time Magazine reported on a new phenomenon: “frosted babies.” Sensationally profiling Dr. Leo Kanner, Time wrote of the children that “they were apathetic, withdrawn, happiest when left alone. They shrank from anything that dis- turbed their isolation: noises, moving objects, people, often even food.” Quickly, the article identified its target: the parents of these children—especially mothers. “The fathers were scientists, college professors.. .All but five of the mothers had gone to college.. .Cold Perfectionists.” Interviewing Kanner at some length, the pediatric psychiatrist remarked that the children were as if “kept neatly in a refrigerator which didn’t defrost.”¹

Collapsing mother and child, container for contained, Time Magazine publicized Kanner’s latest theory: that mothers explicitly had something to do with the infantile autistic states he was diagnosing at Johns Hopkins University. If mother was cold, so too would baby be. Class, education, and race (all of the families were white) each played their role in determining the conditions for diagnosis. But maternal intelligence, book learning, and regimens relating to a child were, he found, the most striking commonality and the foundation of his etiology. Issued into a scientific and social moment that corroborated this stance, the terminology leapt from medical discourse into the culture where it was wielded against such women.

In her second book, historian of science Marga Vicedo gives her reader a moving account of what it was to be a mother described as a cold domestic appliance. Vicedo offers a history of medicine, psychiatry, and disability via the titular story of Clara Park and her daughter Jessy Park. Clara was, in superficial ways both concrete and accidental, the archetype of the refrigerator mother. She was well-educated (a Radcliffe graduate), an intellectual and a writer who worked intermittently after the birth of her children, married to a physicist, well off enough, and living in idyllic Williamstown (her husband was a professor at Williams and she taught at Berkshire Community College and later Williams as well). Upon finding out she was pregnant with her fourth child, Park became depressed and then resigned; she had relished the return to a semblance of the life of the mind while being deeply devoted to her three children but was determined to welcome and care for this next child. Although she fell briefly ill with measles in the sixth month of her pregnancy, her fourth pregnancy proceeded as her others had. Jessy cried as an infant as her three elder children had. And then, in Clara’s understanding, Jessy’s development diverged. At the encourage- ment of friends, she began to take extensive notes on Jessy’s behaviors, language, and mobility, which in turn set Clara down the path of care for Jessy. Instead, Clara Park received diagnoses not just for her daughter, but of herself: her daughter was autistic, and blame was laid at Clara’s feet. Even her loving, devotional observations were taken as a sign that Jessy was Clara’s project first, and daughter second.

Because of Clara and Jessy Park’s both striking and ordinary story—from their visits to Anna Freud’s famous Hampstead Clinic in London and groundbreaking pa- rental activism and writing to quiet moments in the family of six—the reader is of- fered a deep account of the history of autism in theory and in experience. Vicedo expertly weaves the biography of one “refrigerator mother” and her daughter with the history of psychiatry and the history of the pathological cure model of autism as it perceived the Park family, and then was challenged by them. By focusing on a typi- cal—and visible, recognized—refrigerator mother, diagnostic redlining and medical racism are mentioned but not in the fore of Intelligent Love.

Clara Park was not content with the care her daughter received, and she inno- vated and built on...