Deborah Weinstein

Sexuality, therapeutic culture, and family ties in the United States after 1973.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2nd ed.; DSM-II; American Psychiatric Association, 1968). Clinicians subsequently began conducting psychotherapy with gays and lesbians not in order to change their sexuality but to address the psychological effects of homophobia and associated problems. Family-related issues such as the impact of coming out to relatives became an important dimension of psychotherapy that normalized same-sex desire, identity, and relationships, even amid contemporary invocations of family values as grounds for opposing gays and lesbians’ political claims. This article examines family therapy’s gradual recognition of gay and lesbian families as emblematic of the historically changing relationship among psychotherapy, sexuality, and family during the 1970s to 1990s. Although early family therapists of the 1950s and 1960s were largely unconcerned with treating homosexuality as a psychiatric problem, they also generally did not recognize same-sex relationships as a possible configuration of family life because their models presumed a heterosexual nuclear family. By the 1980s and 1990s, many family therapists came to see sexuality as a dimension of family life that might shape the issues for which couples and families sought treatment but that did not warrant treatment itself. Homosexuality’s depathologization in 1973 thus signaled the opening, not the closing, of lesbian and gay issues in family therapy because the cultural trends and social movements that led to homosexuality’s removal from the DSM-II would, by the 1990s, also contribute to expanding family therapists’ notion of “family.”

In The Name of the Child

The history of childhood and childhood studies have become dynamic fields that illuminate broader changes in U.S. history and culture. The books reviewed here make substantial original contributions to the distinct, yet intertwined, histories of childhood and parenting, while enriching research in the history of the human sciences and of the emotions (Vicedo), social history of the family and of sexuality (Rivers), and the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies (Duane). In The Nature and Nurture of Love, Marga Vicedo has written a compelling history of the science of attachment in the decades following World War II. How, Vicedo asks, did mother love come to be seen as central to children’s healthy emotional development and their future as good citizens? As Vicedo notes, the presumption that childrearing held implications for nation building, via the molding of future citizens, has a long and well-studied history. Although scientific and popular attention to the impact of mothers on their children’s moral, social, or even psychological development predated the postwar period, Vicedo convincingly shows how the 1950s became a crucial turning point in elevating belief in the power of an affective and instinctual understanding of maternal care. One particularly influential and enduring framework of the biological basis for children’s emotional needs and mother love was the theory of attachment.

Special Issue Introduction: Science in the Public Eye.

In the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century, the looming specter of war—including the aftermath of World War II, the shadow of the Cold War, and post-Cold War threats to national security—contributed to the social urgency and political salience of scientists’ engagement with the public. With cases drawn primarily from the life sciences, the papers in this special issue explore the interstices of the public, the political, and the popular in scientific work that addressed pressing contemporary problems from the threat of nuclear war, to the dangers of overpopulation, to the hopeful possibility of a peaceful human future. By placing public science at the analytic heart of our histories, we see that the very idea of science—its practices, its sources of authority, its epistemic characteristics—is negotiated in dialogue with multiple publics. The papers build on recent scholarship that has embraced multidimensional approaches to the appropriation of and engagement with science among diverse public communities with a stake in scientific claims. The papers focus, too, on the political stakes of public engagement for scientists. Throughout these decades, questions of citizenship and technical authority required constant renegotiating. Scientists emphasized the importance of their efforts to correct popular misperceptions of scientific ideas. Among popular audiences, the idea that scientists should be held responsible for public misunderstandings of science has not gone away, nor has the impression faded that in trying to engage with non-scientifically trained audiences, scientists deserve any public scrutiny that inevitably follows. In this spirit, our papers attend to a variety of discursive spaces of popular scientific engagement, including print and visual media like books, magazines, and films, designed to reach