Marilyn Brookwood

Author of
The Orphans of Davenport (Liveright, 2021)

Marilyn Brookwood is a psychologist who worked in public education to help adolescents improve academic and personal competence, lectured about adolescent brain development to students, parents and clinicians, held an adjunct faculty position at the College of New Rochelle in New York, and wrote guides for teachers and counselors about adolescent challenges. In 2008 she earned her third postgraduate degree, in Harvard University’s Mind, Brain and Education Program. She has been researching this project for six years. She lives in Cambridge.

Website / Instagram / Twitter / Estate Represented by Ayesha Pande

The Orphans of Davenport (Liveright, 2021)

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

The infants lay for months in cribs that blocked their vision, and they were never held, hardly touched, rarely spoken to. “Doomed from birth” was the way young Iowa state psychologist Harold Skeels described the two toddler girls at the Orphans Home in Davenport, Iowa, in 1934. Their IQ scores, added together, totaled 81. They were part of a wave of abandoned, abused, and neglected children dropped off at the orphanage during the Great Depression, whose parents came from the lowest rungs of society. In line with prevailing eugenic beliefs, Skeels assumed the two girls inherited defective intelligence and poor character and therefore were unfit for adoption. He had no choice but to place them in an institution for the feeble-minded to spend the rest of their lives. When they were older they would likely be involuntarily sterilized. But because of extreme overcrowding, they were sent to live in a home for “moron” women. To his great astonishment, under the women’s care the children’s intelligence became normal. No one understood how that could happen.

The Orphans of Davenport: The Untold Story of Great Depression Psychologists in Iowa Who Accidentally Discovered What Makes Children Smart describes for the first time how an unknown psychologist from a modest research group in Iowa made the crucial discovery that environment changes children’s intelligence. And it describes the vicious backlash from America’s most established psychologists, all of whom were eugenicists, who scorned and denounced the discoveries, ensuring that the research would remain ignored for decades. Finally, in 1966 the Iowans’ ideas found support from a new generation of psychologists, and from the Kennedy family. Their revolutionary work overthrew long accepted racist and classist views of human development, and launched psychology’s modern age. Yet today no one knows their names. In the tradition of Henrietta Lacks and Hidden Figures, which also revealed untold stories of heroes who changed the world, The Orphans of Davenport is a riveting tale about scientific discovery clashing with deeply rooted beliefs and self-interest.

PRAISE

"A triumph of empathetic scholarship, a story whose characters―from the children to the brave scientists who advocated for their care―make for truly compelling, and sometimes heartbreaking, reading. The importance of Marilyn Brookwood’s story extends well beyond its midwestern locale, exposing as it does the darker currents of pseudoscience and homophobia that would plague the twentieth century. A remarkable and beautifully written account."
―R. Tripp Evans, author of Grant Wood: A Life

"Psychologist Brookwood debuts with a lucid and immersive history of how researchers in 1930s Iowa refuted prevailing notions about childhood development. … Brookwood’s well-paced, character-driven account is a worthy tribute to these optimistic and determined researchers, and a reminder that scientific breakthroughs can come from the unlikeliest of places. This spirited history soars."
―Publishers Weekly

"Drawing masterfully on numerous archives, Brookwood recounts in lucid, page-turning prose the empirical open-mindedness of the Iowa psychologists, their personal and collaborative lives, and their caring follow-up of the children after they were adopted. She rightly emphasizes the larger significance of their findings and the victory they ultimately achieved against slashing attacks from eugenicists and leading mental testers. In all, a gripping, upending story."
―Daniel J. Kevles, author of In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity

"This gripping untold story of the nurture-nature debate is for anyone interested in how parenting shapes the development of a child’s mind and brain. Masterfully weaving history, sociology, and neuropsychology, The Orphans of Davenport will tug at your heartstrings and forever change the way you think about what it means to be smart."
―Alexandra Sacks, coauthor of What No One Tells You: A Guide to Your Emotions from Pregnancy to Motherhood

"A fascinating and often moving book―and one of the best that I’ve read in a very long time. . . . It will appeal to anyone interested in the nature-nurture debate, the history of psychology, child-rearing, the eugenics movement, or simply fans of beautifully written books."
―Jonathan Spiro, author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant