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  • Reconstructing Disability
  • Richard K. Scotch (bio)
Sarah F. Rose. No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2017. xiii + 398 pp. 17 halftones, 11 graphs, notes, bibliography, index. Hardcover $95.00 Paperback $39.95 E-Book $29.99.
Audra Jennings. Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 296 pp. 10 illustrations, notes, index, acknowledgements. Cloth $55.00; E-book $55.00.

That disability is a social construction rather than simply a medical fact is best demonstrated by broad analyses that document how societal changes shape the lives of people with disabilities. Focusing on how the hinges of history lead to changes in the response to impairment can provide useful insights into what is inherent in life with an impairment and how the social meaning of physical and mental conditions has different consequences across historical eras. Sarah F. Rose and Audra Jennings have provided two excellent accounts of how societal changes are associated with reconstruction of the understanding and consequences of disability.

Sarah F. Rose, in her wide-ranging and imaginative study No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s, examines how the definition and consequences of impairments evolved with the industrialization of the United States. Rose begins with a look at the creation of "idiot asylums" in the mid-nineteenth century. These asylums became catch-all receptacles for individuals who could not function independently in their largely agrarian communities as the result of physical and mental conditions. Yet for many of those judged to be "idiots," a brief period of socialization and training allowed them to return to their household economies to contribute at some meaningful level as workers in agriculture (for the men) and in domestic activities (for the women).

The book goes on to explain how, with the rise of an increasingly urban industrial society, asylums changed along with the circumstances of people with disabilities. Residents of asylums were no longer referred to as pupils, there to learn living skills, and increasingly were called "inmates." These inmates were less likely to be sent by their functioning families, and more likely to enter asylums from families in distress or from coercive institutions such as [End Page 490] poorhouses. The diminishing role of agriculture and household production in the late nineteenth century economy meant that people who were "partially productive" but not sufficiently competitive in regular full-time wage labor were harder to integrate into households, making it more difficult for them to be released to their family or the community. This meant a rising proportion of asylum residents never were discharged, remaining there for the rest of their lives. Residents' labor helped maintain the increasingly custodial asylums, which also faced greater financial constraints in public funding.

The rise of beliefs in the hereditary nature of many conditions meant that reintegration was seen as impractical for disabled people whose capacities were viewed as limited by their genetic makeup. At the same time, "scientific" charity emerged, which labelled many in need of assistance as incorrigible and incapable of self-improvement. In the early twentieth century, the experience of using residents to operate the support services within asylums led to efforts to market their services to outside parties, as laborers and in farm "colonies" that produced goods for external markets. Conflicts arose between those who sought to enable activity outside of the institutions to promote independence and/or the financial benefits to the asylums and to hardcore "hereditarians" who were convinced that such community engagement was impractical and ill-conceived due to the intrinsic limitations of most disabled individuals.

Rose then turns to the topic of disability in industry, documenting the ubiquity of work-related impairment in working-class lives. Virtually every worker in the factories and railroads of the late nineteenth century acquired a disability (or several) over the course of their working lives. However, employers rehired many of these disabled workers following their recoveries, albeit often in different jobs at lower wages. Disablement could be seen as a sign of experience and commitment, rather than the result of incompetence or moral shortcoming. In the early decades of the...

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