A Disability History of the United States (2 page)

Defining disability is difficult—and that’s part of my argument. Although the definition theoretically has been based on bodies, the categorization of bodies as disabled has been shaped by factors such as gender, race, sexuality, education, levels of industrialization or standardization, access to adaptive equipment or privacy, and class. With age and medical care, as well as the vagaries of life, or simply daily context, one can move in and out of the category of “people with disabilities.” One can be temporarily disabled due to accident or illness. Disabilities can be easily “read” by others (signified by the presence of a wheelchair or the sounds of a speech impediment), or more difficult to discern (such as some psychological disabilities or neurological disabilities).

Disability can be contextual, and its meanings have changed over time. A simplistic example: a fellow historian and I once spent a delightful few days in Montreal at an academic conference. Those around me read my body as nondisabled. The white cane of my friend led others to read her as blind and disabled. Waiters and cab drivers always looked to me to take the lead. However, and to their dismay, I don’t speak French. Luckily, my colleague is fluent in French. In that context, my linguistic deficiencies became far more of an impediment, far more disabling, than her blindness. Disability is not just a bodily category, but instead and also a social category shaped by changing social factors—just as is able-bodiedness.

This is not to argue that we should all hold hands and cheerfully insist that we’re all disabled in some way or another. That ignores the lived reality that disability can bring physical discomfort or difficulty. It also ignores the historical reality that being defined as disabled has made access to power and resources limited or difficult; and that hierarchies of power contribute to definitions of disability. For example, in the nineteenth century, medical experts argued that menstruation and reproduction so impaired women’s bodies (those of middle- and upper-class white women, at least) that their exclusion from higher education and employment was absolutely necessary, for themselves and for the greater good of society. And in the early twentieth century, if public transportation was not accessible, and employers refused to hire a man with only one leg, then exclusionary ideas and resources—not the condition of being one-legged—generated social segregation and unemployment. These are real consequences.

Real consequences include poverty. People with disabilities disproportionately live in poverty and have lower rates of higher education. One of the most troubling aspects of researching this book was reading the historiography on poverty. Many historians of poverty simply assume that it’s an inevitability that people with disabilities live disproportionately in poverty. But the feminization and racialization of poverty in the United States are not natural and unavoidable consequences. Neither is it natural and unavoidable that Mississippi has a higher rate of poverty than Wisconsin. These are the results of specific social structures: specific histories, legal practices, industrialization and development policies, educational-access histories, tax structures, ideologies, and more. This book will make clear that people with disabilities have lived and continue to live with disproportionately higher rates of poverty because of specific social structures, ideologies, and practices that hinder their social advancement.

Ideologies and practices that belittle and/or limit people with disabilities arise from ableist attitudes. Ableist attitudes are those that reflect a fear of, an aversion to, or discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities. They can be as blatant as a refusal to hire someone with an apparent disability, or as subtle as the assumption that everyone attending a concert can stand for two hours. Like racism, sexism, or homophobia, ableism is directed at individuals and built into social structures; it is lived out purposefully, accidentally, and unknowingly. Ableist ideologies shape our media, for example, when people with disabilities are either completely absent or portrayed only as tragic and sad figures. They permeate our dominant standards of beauty and sexiness, definitions of what it means to dance, and measures of healthfulness. They also shape our expectations for leadership and success.

Human variability is immense. We see and hear in varying degrees, our limbs are of different lengths and strengths, our minds process information differently, we communicate using different methods and speeds, we move from place to place via diverse methods, and our eye colors are not the same. Some of us can soothe children, some have spiritual insight, and some discern the emotions of others with astounding skill. Which bodily and mental variabilities are considered inconsequential, which are charming, and which are stigmatized, changes over time—and that is the history of disability.

Parts of this book unexpectedly saddened me more deeply than I had anticipated. The story of the French slave ship
Le Rodeur,
detailed in
chapter 3
, conjured mental images that I found and continue to find intensely disturbing—and I hope that readers do too, for it is a human story that should be read as such. I experienced other parts of this story as joyful, funny, a call to action, and invigorating. It is my hope that readers, too, will experience this spectrum of emotions, and be equally exhilarated and stirred by this new perspective on the old American story that many of us know so well. That is the history of disability.

Despite the ever-growing scholarship in disability history and the growing popularity of disability-oriented biographies and memoirs, no one has attempted to create a wide-ranging chronological American history narrative told through the lives of people with disabilities.
A Disability History of the United States,
while not a comprehensive narrative, attempts to fill this gap. This book could not have been completed without the scholarship, activism, and narrative accounts of others; those who knew they were telling the story of disability and those who did not.

Just as other scholars have retold the American story by using gender, class, sexuality, and race as tools of analysis, my purpose is to use disability to help us better understand the history of the United States. I hope to provide an example of what it means to consider disability alongside these other analyses as a means of historical inquiry and understanding. I also hope to provide an example of how disability intertwines with race, gender, class, and sexuality. Because disability, as a concept, has been used in many historical time periods to explain and justify definitions of these other social categories, using disability as an analytical tool is one means by which historians and other scholars can attempt simultaneous and multiple analyses.

My purpose also is to galvanize much needed additional scholarship. In many ways,
A Disability History of the United States
poses more historical questions than answers. There are, undoubtedly, questions, topics, and insights that scholars have not yet even begun to consider. For example, historian Margot Canaday argued, in her 2009 book
The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America,
that a primary means of the development of the modern bureaucratic American state was through the policing of sexual norms. Similarly, the story of US history told here suggests (and I am hopeful historians will explore this further) that another means by which the modern bureaucratic state developed was through the definition, and implementation of the definition, of disability. My work also suggests that US capitalism and industrialization both literally and conceptually contributed to the creation of disability. Significant scholarship remains to be done.

A Disability History of the United States
begins prior to European conquest and colonization.
Chapter 1
examines what is known about disability in the widely diverse cultures of indigenous peoples in North America.
Chapters 2
and
3
analyze disability’s role in shaping and defining the new nation, the lives of newly arrived Europeans and Africans with disabilities, and the consequences of European conquest and diseases upon Native communities.
Chapters 4
and
5
explore the solidification of disability as a rhetorical, legal, and social category. As the new nation, experimenting with democracy, sought to define and distinguish between good and bad citizens, political theorists contrasted “idiots,” “lunatics,” women, and the enslaved with those worthy of full citizenship. The realities of the Civil War, growing urbanization and industrialization, along with the beginnings of the Progressive Era, created expanded institutional spaces for people with disabilities. Such institutions were both devastating and empowering.

Chapter 6
analyzes the contradictions of turn-of-the-century America in which eugenics, the oralist movement, immigration restrictions, state compulsory-sterilization laws, and increased medicalization, and even some of the suffrage movement’s rhetoric, emphasized the undesirability of disabled people as citizens. Simultaneously, however, people with disabilities resisted—using vaudeville and freak shows, for example, as places of resistance and community.
Chapter 7
shows how people with disabilities increasingly organized throughout the middle of the twentieth century—to create and pass legislation, to expand educational and vocational opportunities, to define disability discrimination as unjust discrimination, and to recognize the beauty and grace of people with disabilities.

Chapter 8
analyzes the period from 1968 to the present, a period that included significant activism and self-definition among people with disabilities and their allies. In the process, disability culture intensified and sometimes entered the mainstream. Just as women critiqued hierarchies based on the physical differences of sex, and just as people of color critiqued hierarchies based on the physical differences of race, so did people with disabilities critique hierarchies based on the physical differences of disability. A new generation embraced education and access as a right, and young people came of age with radically different expectations of what it means to be an American with a disability.

A Disability History of the United States
tells an old story from a new perspective by reexamining it through the lives of people with disabilities. The narrative of US history thus revealed pushes us—as individuals, communities, and a nation—to ponder once again our obligations to each other, the national ideals we extol, and the varying ways we define the ideal American citizen.

“Cripple,” “idiot,” “retard,” “lunatic,” “feeble-minded,” “freak,” “crazy,” “handicap,” “lame,” “special,” “slow,” “differently-abled” . . . The words used to refer to people with disabilities have changed over time as ideas about disability have changed over time; indeed, changing words reflect historical change. Authority figures as well as neighbors and family routinely used, and sometimes still routinely use, words now considered tasteless, problematic, condescendingly sweet, or downright offensive.
A Disability History of the United States
uses these words—not to shock readers awake, but to better understand US history and historical change.

As an author I’m careful about the words that I use. Words matter. For example, characterizing someone as “wheelchair bound” or “confined to a wheelchair” is profoundly different than characterizing them as a “wheelchair user” or “wheelchair rider.” The differentiation is not political correctness: it is an entirely different ideological and intellectual framework of comprehension. The contemporary disability-rights movement has understood that redefining and reclaiming language is central to self-direction, just as it has been for feminist; lesbian, gay, queer, and transgender; and racial freedom movements.

In ironic and interesting ways,
the absence of words
also has formed this book. As I tell the story of US history, I will argue that disability permeates our national history and our study of it—though we are often unaware or have failed to acknowledge it. The words “disability” and “handicap” often do not show up in book indexes or as database keywords. Historians such as I have had to be creative in our keyword searches—using historically specific terms for specific disabilities (such as “lunatick” or “blind”), as well as reading between the lines of discussions of illness, social welfare, activism, vagrancy, and health.

I fumbled my way into disability history by accident over a decade ago when I ran across a political speech of Helen Keller’s. Trained in the history of women and politics, and always interested in how women justified themselves as civic beings in a public world that discouraged their involvement, I became fascinated by Keller’s political life and its general erasure from our historical record. I knew nearly nothing about her, had no prior interest in disability, had no immediate family member with a disability, and identified as a nondisabled person. From that moment on, however, I immersed myself in disability history and disability studies scholarship. The rest of my story, as one might say, is history.

Good historical analysis is good historical analysis. Vigorous training, stubbornness, practice, and some skill combine to make me a good historian. It’s more complicated, however. I’m female, white, earned a PhD, have a male spouse, am not yet perceived as elderly, live in the United States, and I am a native English speaker. As someone who also identifies and is perceived as nondisabled, I embody privilege. For me, doing smart disability history requires vigorous historical analysis, but it also requires that I acknowledge and wrestle with my privilege. Along the route I’ve made some mistakes and I have learned a great deal.

Of course, however, to be honest, as I worked with Beacon Press to prepare the proposal for this book, at heart I thought that I knew everything.

Then, of course, life happened.

A week or two after signing the contract for
A Disability History of the United States,
and after I’d been in the field for over a decade, my then sixteen-year-old daughter suddenly became seriously ill. As a result she became a disabled young woman.