Elizabeth Maher is a PhD. Candidate in the Department of History, University of Illinois at Chicago, and a 2024-2025 Consortium Research Fellow.
My dissertation “Building Mechanical Boys: A Raced and Gendered History of Autism in the 20th Century United States,” denaturalizes autism’s association with white technocratic masculinity by revealing that association as the product of strategic decisions made by psy-professionals (psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts etc.), parent advocates, popular authors and autistic self-advocates. It analyzes how the project of developing and popularizing autism as a diagnosis, particularly during the first 40 years of the development of the diagnosis, was intertwined with and subject to the larger project of producing middle-class white male citizens who could succeed within the demands of the Cold War state and later in an increasingly neoliberal society. Beginning in the late 1930s with development of autism as a discrete diagnosis to the eve of the supposed “autism epidemic” of the 1990s I trace how a variety of actors used discourse around autism as a platform to express anxieties and hopes around changing conceptions of white masculinity.
In exploring how and why psy-professionals, parent advocates, authors and educators racialized and gendered autism as a diagnosis I illustrate how psychiatry served as a platform to (re)construct, debate and legitimize biologically and culturally based notions of inherent white male supremacy in the mid-twentieth century United States. I argue that psy-professionals, authors, and eventually parents used autism as a means of articulating, naturalizing and justifying white middle-class gender norms which I refer to as “white technocratic masculinity” and “white technocratic domesticity.” The World War II and post-war eras saw major changes in U.S. society. Black activists bolstered by their critical role in the war effort both at home and abroad increasingly criticized the hypocrisy of the U.S. government claiming to fight Nazi racism abroad while violently enforcing our own white supremacist system at home. World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War provided fuel for existing trends towards bureaucratization and automation. The proliferation of new technologies from the atomic bomb to early computers to household appliances seemed to herald at once the apex and the doom of white masculinist civilization. Contemporaries and historians have discussed the “crisis of masculinity” that occurred in the early years of the Cold War, but of course this was more precisely a “crisis of white masculinity.” This supposed crisis was accompanied by the expansion of higher education and the rise of an educated “New Class” of knowledge workers, bureaucrats and scientists. World War II and the post-war era also saw the expansion and enshrinement of the role of experts in U.S. society and nowhere was that more true than in the growing fields of psychiatry and psychology. The participation of psychiatrists and psychologists in the war had helped to legitimize the psy-professions in the eyes of many Americans. Many psy-professionals in turn hoped to trade on this positive publicity to present themselves as new modern experts who could help “worried well” learn to achieve “the good life.” In the wake of these societal changes discourse on autism served as one of many platforms where white professionals and public intellectuals reframed the privileges of whiteness as entitlements earned through technical and technocratic expertise and through conformity to white middle-class heteropatriarchal gender norms.
While autistic activists and disability studies scholars are increasingly addressing the pernicious association between autism and white masculinity much of their analysis has focused on relatively recent portrayals of autism. This dissertation seeks to uncover the historical roots of autism’s association with both white masculinity and technical/technocratic intelligence and the subsequent reification of an innate linkage between the two. While academic writing on autism history, both by historians and other humanities scholars, has become an increasingly common topic of research, this dissertation is the first in-depth historical study of how autism became, or rather was designed as, a white male diagnosis.
In order to understand the racialization of autism as a diagnosis it is necessary to explore the relationship between autism and another controversial diagnosis, schizophrenia and particularly childhood schizophrenia. The term autism was initially coined by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911 as a symptom of his new diagnosis of schizophrenia. Bleuler used the term autism to describe a rejection of the external world in favor of a focus on internal fantasy life. While Bleuler focused on adult patients by the 1930s psychiatrists in the United States were applying the diagnosis of “childhood schizophrenia” to their young patients. These early accounts of childhood schizophrenia associated the diagnosis with “not quite white” populations, particularly Jewish and Italian immigrants. Psychiatrists often alluded to perceived Jewish gender deviance on the part of the parents as somehow linked to childhood schizophrenia particularly in young boys.
When John Hopkins’ pediatrician Leo Kanner first introduced the concept of autism as a discrete diagnosis in 1943, he received push back from several other child psychiatrists who argued that what Kanner described as early infantile autism was best understood as a subtype of childhood schizophrenia. Kanner vacillated on whether or not he was willing to define autism as a subtype of schizophrenia. Kanner sought to distinguish autism from preexisting diagnoses of both childhood schizophrenia and “mental retardation.” He did so largely by seeking to associate early infantile autism with hereditary familial intelligence. Kanner emphasized what he described as the unusual intelligence of the parents and family members of the children he diagnosed as autistic and the “good intellectual potentialities” of the children. Kanner defined intelligence in terms of academic and professional success waxing poetic about the parents’ graduate degrees and the families’ inclusion in Who’s Who in America or in American Men of Science. Kanner also specified that of the eleven children discussed in his initial 1943 paper nine were of “Anglo-Saxon” descent with the remaining two being Jewish. Thus, from the outset Kanner associated autism, and his image of the autism family with perceived technical intelligence, middle-class status, and whiteness. Kanner sought to market his diagnosis of early infantile autism as an acceptable diagnosis for scions of the white middle-class and for Kanner, which often meant distancing autism from childhood schizophrenia.
While other child psychiatrists, most notable Lauretta Bender, attempted to reconceptualize childhood schizophrenia as a white middle-class diagnosis that paralleled Kanner’s early infantile autism over the course of the 1950s and 1960s other psychiatrists increasingly associated schizophrenia with Black masculinity. While Jonathan Metzl has written about white psychiatrists reframed schizophrenia as a “protest psychosis” in order to pathologize Black protest in the 1950s and 1960s my research on psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s papers at the Library of Congress showed that by the 1950s child psychiatrists at institutions like Bellevue Hospital were using the diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia in a similar manner. During the 1950s autism and childhood schizophrenia thus became racially bifurcated diagnosis. Psy-professionals like Kanner and later psychologist and parent advocate Bernard Rimland were able to maintain autism’s status as a diagnosis associated with the white middle-class because they used more stigmatized diagnoses like childhood schizophrenia and mental retardation as run-off valves, as convenient diagnoses for children whose backgrounds did not fit within the image of the autistic person, or the autism family that they wished to curate. Thus, in order to truly understand the development of autism as a diagnosis it is necessary to examine how it developed in parallel with childhood schizophrenia.
With support from the Consortium for History of Science Technology and Medicine I was able to visit the Yale University Sterling Memorial Library, The National Library of Medicine, and the Library of Congress. My research at Sterling Memorial Library and The National Library of Medicine allowed me to access archival documents and videos created by Amy Lettick. Lettick was a prominent parent advocate beginning in the 1960s. In 1967 she founded Benhaven, a private non-profit school for autistic students. Lettick was also an early member of the National Society for Autistic Children (NSAC). Founded in 1965 NSAC was the first parent advocacy organization in the United States to specifically focus on autism. Lettick’s papers and videos, in addition to providing vital insight into the development of educational infrastructure aimed at autistic children by middle-class families in the period before the passage of the Individual’s with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1975, also offer critical details about the internal politics of NSAC during its early years. Lettick’s papers also include parts of her correspondence with fellow parent advocate Rosalind Oppenheim author of the 1961 Saturday Evening Post article “They Said Our Child Was Hopeless.” Lettick and Oppenheim’s correspondence reveals the networks of support and information sharing that parent advocates developed as well as the tension that existed between parent advocates.
One particularly interesting finding came from my Amy Lettick’s papers which helped illuminate the origins of the use of American Sign Language (ASL) as a means of communication for non-speaking or minimally speaking autistic people. In 1967 Amy Lettick founded Benhaven, a school for autistic children Connecticut in order to provide educational opportunities for her son Benjamin Lettick and other autistic children, particularly those who were viewed as having high support needs. While Benhaven was a private school many of its students’ tuitions were paid for by the Connecticut Department of Education since Connecticut Public Schools were not equipped to provide sufficient educational resources for autistic students with high support needs. Because some of the students at Benhaven, including Benjamin Lettick, were Deaf, the school established a reciprocal relationship with Connecticut’s American School for the Deaf in which instructors from both schools would provide training to help each other meet their students’ specific needs. As part of this program Deaf students at Benhaven were taught ASL and instructors at Benhaven were also taught ASL so that they could communicate with their Deaf students. This adoption of ASL as a means of communication at Benhaven allowed students and instructors to realize that some hearing non-speaking or minimally speaking students were able to communicate using ASL. ASL was soon made available as a language of communication for all students at Benhaven. The adoption of ASL at Benhaven, initially for Deaf students but then for hearing as well as Deaf students provides insight into how disabled people learn from one another and the role of multiply disabled people in shaping disability culture.
While in my initial application to the Consortium I only proposed utilizing the Virginia Hamilton papers at the Library of Congress when reviewing my application archivists recommended several other collections that opened new avenues for my research. Specifically, they made me aware that the Library of Congress also held the papers of psychiatrists Fredric Wertham and William H. Grier. In their own way each of these collections provided vital insights into the racialization of childhood schizophrenia and the role of the psy-professions in pathologizing Black life in the mid-20th century. Wertham who along with novelist Richard Wright founded the Larfargue Clinic the first low-cost outpatient mental health clinic in Harlem in 1946 was careful in documenting the discrimination that Black New Yorker’s faced at the hands of major psychiatric institutions in the city. Grier in his notes and manuscripts for his influential 1968 book Black Rage discussed how psychiatry was used on both an individual and community level to portray Black discontent with white supremacist systems as pathological. In her 1971 Newberry Medal nominated young adult book The Planet of Junior Brown Virginia Hamilton both critiqued the pathologization of Black culture by white society and constructed an alternative society centered around the needs of neurodivergent Black youth. Visiting these collections and reading them alongside each other, as well as alongside Lettick’s papers illuminated the critical but often overlooked role of race in shaping the development of psychiatric diagnoses in the mid-20th century United States. Both popular and clinical understandings of autism and schizophrenia continue to be shaped by these legacies. I am grateful to the Consortium for History of Science Technology and Medicine for providing me with the financial and intellectual support necessary to pursue this research.