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Unfixed: How the Women of Glenwood Changed American IQ, and Why We Don't Know It

Time: March 21, 2018, 4:30 p.m. - 6 p.m.

Location: Peter Graham Scholarly Commons, 114 Bird Library

Susan Schweik (University of California, Berkeley)

In 1939, a popular science magazine trumpeted, "Dull Babies Made Normal By Feeble-Minded Girls’ Care: Increase of as Much as 40 Points in IQ Reported.” The article described an experiment by psychologist Harold Skeels in which orphanage toddlers were transferred to the State Institution for the “Mentally Defective” in Glenwood, Iowa to be nurtured by women incarcerated there. Other “contrast” children left behind in the orphanage did worse by any measure. Raising the children in tandem with low-wage women workers who were their attendants, the women of Glenwood developed a radically interdependent kinship model that profoundly (but briefly, and under conditions of domination) called into question the usual terms and stratifications of intelligence, normalcy, cure, and care.

Computer Assisted Real-Time Translation (CART) will be provided at this public lecture.


This event is part of the Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professorship in the Humanities series with its theme for 2018: Bodies of Evidence: Documenting/Representing Injustice, Confinement and Incarceration.


Additional Supporters
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Additional Supporters:

  • School of Education
  • David B. Falk College of Sport & Human Dynamics
  • Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
  • Center on Human Policy, Legacy Fund for Disability Studies and Human Policy
  • Disability Cultural Center
  • Department of English & Textual Studies
  • Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition
  • Cultural Foundations of Education (CFE)
  • Department of Sociology
  • Department of History
  • Department of Women’s & Gender Studies
  • SU Bookstore
  • SU Libraries & Special Collections Research Center

Beth Ferri / Michael Gill, Inclusive Education & Disability Studies / Disability Studies, School of Education