The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation (review)

Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames. The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. xxix + 278 pp. $79.50 (cloth, 1-56639-811-8), $24.95 (paperbound, 1-56639-812-6).

An antipathy toward the medical model characterizes the disability rights movement. Instead of emphasizing the notion of deficit, as in the definition of disability as a medically demonstrable impairment that leads to a functional limitation, the leaders of the movement choose to highlight the concept of difference. In this view, people with disabilities are not deficient so much as they are different from others. Since differences are, in a sense, socially constructed, then presumably they can be deconstructed through public education and law. In other words, disability as a policy problem is about civil rights, not medicine or even income maintenance. These insights have fueled a movement for which this book provides an overview.

The Disability Rights Movement fills a significant gap in the literature. Although we have a number of sturdy books that chronicle the beginnings of the movement, we have nearly none that take the story through the 1990s. The things we do have for this recent period come closer to political tracts than to dispassionate analyses. The authors of this book are committed to the movement and eager to show its relevance to the contemporary political scene. Still, they try hard to create an objective narrative that does not portray the movement as an inevitable triumph. They realize, for example, that the same curb cuts that benefit people in wheel chairs hinder people who are blind, and that not everyone self-identifies as a person with a disability rather than as, say, an elderly person.

The authors do a very good job describing the various groups who have contributed to the disability rights movement, such as those around the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley. They also provide an accessible account of how the Americans with Disabilities Act came to be passed in 1990, and what its consequences have been. Throughout the book they are alert to the similarities and differences between the disability rights movement and other civil rights movements—in particular, the black civil rights movement.

Where I would fault the book is in its organization. Instead of a coherent narrative, the authors provide us with a topical account that is somewhat disjointed chronologically. We weave back and forth through time, which made it hard for this historically inclined reader to get his bearings. Nor can this book be confused with the work of a professional historian. In particular, the authors do no archival research and rely instead on interviews and the secondary literature. That serves them well in a book about contemporary events, but I think the literature could be enriched by matching oral memory with documents from the archives (and such archives are beginning to exist in places like Berkeley).

For those who want an excellent overview of the disability rights movement, and for those historians of medicine who wish to understand more about the complex relationships between people with disabilities and the medical profession, this book is the best place to start. It provides a secure base on which other researchers, interested in this intriguing topic, might build.