Book Review: Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia: From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin by Barbara Alpern Engel

Abstract

erate productive scholarship on the family. This book indicates but leaves unstated the suggestion that scientifically generated ableist ideologies were central to twentieth-century US familial norms. As scholars, we can dig further with a disability analysis and generate new questions about the history of the family. Helpful in this process is existing scholarship such as that by Allison C. Carey on the twentieth-century families of those with developmental disabilities; Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Jen Cellio’s edited collection Disability and Mothering: Liminal Spaces of Embodied Knowledge (2011); and the explosion of materials by individuals who claim a neurodiverse or autistic identity. A generative piece of scholarship, Intelligent Love prompts an additional number of questions from which historians of the family may benefit. How have non-privileged families made their own through, and resisted, or drowned in, the labyrinth of weighty medical and scientific expertise? How have non-normative families waded through the powerful influences of medicine and expertise? How does the history of the family overlap with that of disability, foster care, and adoption? Intellegent Lovewill enrich scholars and courses on the history of the family, medicine, education, and science. Vicedo explains highly scientific arguments in accessible language without overly simplifying them, making it a readable and teachable book.