Blame the mothers, then ask whose voices are missing
After WWII the cause of autism shifted from biological to psychological — and landed squarely on mothers. Rimland pushed back. But the voices I found first were all white, male, and old.
After World War II there was a shift: the causes of autism and neurodivergence came to be seen as psychological instead of biological — or psychological on top of biological. Bruno Bettelheim, an Austrian-American psychologist working in Chicago, placed the blame for autism squarely on the backs of the mothers who raised their children with emotional coldness and rejection. The problem with this premise was that there was no good scientific evidence to support it. But too late — it was out there as mostly the mother's fault.
One scientist in the 60s who could not accept the refrigerator mother theory was Bernard Rimland — an American psychologist with an autistic child. His groundbreaking work argued autism has a biological basis and is not the result of bad parenting, pushing the narrative from "what did parents do to cause this?" to "what is happening biologically, and how can we understand the neurodivergence within this child?" He was not an advocate of the neurodiversity perspective yet — many feel he still saw neurodivergence as a problem to fix — but he was one of the first parent advocates.
At this point in my research, the one thing that stands out to me is the missing voices of neurodivergent people themselves — and the voices of the global majority (is this the right terminology?). The voices I Google immediately are white, male, and old. It was scientists diagnosing and talking about neurodiverse people, not the voices of neurodiverse people themselves. So — let's go digging for more voices that balance the narrative.