HEART-BREAKING PREJUDICE: 2/4: Marilyn Brookwood, THE ORPHANS OF DAVENPORT: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War over Children's Intelligence, by Marilyn Brookwood

Jul 23, 2023, 01:12 AM

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HEART-BREAKING PREJUDICE: 2/4: Marilyn Brookwood, THE ORPHANS OF DAVENPORT: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War over Children's Intelligence, by Marilyn Brookwood   

https://www.amazon.com/Orphans-Davenport-Depression-Childrens-Intelligence/dp/1631494686

The fascinating―and eerily timely―tale of the forgotten, Depression-era psychologists who launched the modern science of childhood development.

“Doomed from birth” was how the psychologist Harold Skeels described two toddler girls at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport, Iowa, in 1934. Their IQ scores, added together, totaled just 81. Following prevailing eugenic beliefs of the times, Skeels and his colleague Marie Skodak assumed that the girls had inherited their parents’ low intelligence and were therefore unfit for adoption. The girls were sent to an institution for the “feebleminded” to be cared for by “moron” women. To Skeels and Skodak’s astonishment, under the women’s care, the children’s IQ scores became normal.