An author and researcher living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Brookwood says it all started with a chance discussion with a friend about early childhood development.
"And he said years ago his mentor told him about these children who had been retarded and were sent to live with these women, and who became normal. And I said to him, that's not possible, I'm a psychologist, I'm trained as a psychologist, and I have never heard that story."
And she was so taken by the story, she decided she had to be the one to tell it.
In 1934, two orphans, living at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans Home in Davenport were considered "retarded," based on their test scores, with everyone assuming they'd inherited low intelligence from their parents. But after being cared for by women at another institution, their IQ scores became normal.
"No one considered any other possibility, other than nature for development. It had to be that children inherited who they were and what they became from things that happened in their families, in their homes. It was like that, it wasn't anything more glorious than that.
The leading figure in psychology at the time was Lewis Terman. Brookwood says he was brilliant, powerful, and rejected any competing ideas - including that anything besides "nature" determined a person's intelligence.
"If people would suggest to him that there was another way, he just attacked them. He was so powerful in psychology that people listened to him and they believed him, and he didn't ever back down. So he held off almost all other psychologists for 30 years."
And how could researchers at a backwater like the University of Iowa compete with renowned faculties at Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton.
Brookwood says the Iowa researchers had been trained in the Terman-based prevailing view of the day, that nature was the determining factor, but became convinced of the importance of "nurture" during their research.
"But once they did, they began to do research with these children, and they found that these new ideas were correct. Then they were really in trouble because nobody wanted to hear that, and nobody wanted to talk to them, and nobody wanted to read their papers and they had a very, very difficult road to getting recognized."
"What's also important is that these people in Iowa had a great deal that they had to un-learn in order to see what they were experiencing, and what was developing under their care. Imagine if you had to unlearn the rules of grammar, how would you write, how would you think, how would you consider things ? That's what they had to do and they did it to come to terms with the fact that everything they'd been taught was wrong."
Unfortunately, this great breakthrough was not immediately adopted by other psychologists. In fact it wasn't until Lewis Terman died in the 1960's, that a new generation was willing to accept the importance of both, nature and nurture, in intelligence.
"This was an inflection moment in the history of one of the most important areas of study in academia, and we need to pay attention to those moments that don't necessarily fit the pattern that we think we're looking for or we think we should be finding. How come those children who were adopted, especially the ones who were adopted very young, how come they did so well ? Can we explain that ?"
In June, Marilyn Brookwood's book about the Orphans of Davenport received an award from the State Historical Society of Iowa, for being the most significant book published about Iowa History during the previous calendar year.
