1/4: The Orphans of Davenport: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War over Children's Intelligence, by Marilyn Brookwood @MarilynBrookwo1 @wwnorton.

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1/4: The Orphans of Davenport: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War over Children's Intelligence, by Marilyn Brookwood  @MarilynBrookwo1    @wwnorton.  Hardcover – July 27, 2021

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.

Now considered one of the most important scientific findings of the twentieth century, the discovery that environment shapes children’s intelligence was also one of the most fiercely contested―and its origin story has never been told. In The Orphans of Davenport, the psychologist and esteemed historian Marilyn Brookwood chronicles how a band of young psychologists in 1930s Iowa shattered the nature-versus-nurture debate and overthrew long-accepted racist and classist views of childhood development.