The New Disability History: American Perspectives (review)

Historians of medicine and technology will find this book an interesting introduction to a highly politicized and novel area of scholarship. The contributors seek to examine how legislation, culture, and public policy interact with societies' definitions of disability, and many of them focus on how the individual's own experiences are negotiated within an identity of disability. Passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 has introduced into mainstream politics the idea that the exclusion of the disabled from normal society is a form of discrimination. This act enshrined in American law a heightened awareness of the disabled as a social category equivalent to gender and race. As editors Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky write, "disability has, it seems, at last won a place in the national conversation" (p. 1).

Accordingly, this book is a call for a new history that reflects this redefinition of disability as a social and political category. While not completely rejecting a physical basis for defining disability, the contributors on the whole argue that a new methodology for studying the history of disability is required to explore the parameters through which the identity of disability is constructed: "Historical examination of disability based on medical pathology misinterprets or filters out a great deal of evidence. It distorts our understanding. The contributors to this collection offer a new approach that examines social, cultural, and political factors; they accord people with disabilities an active role in their own history" (p. 8).

Contributors to the volume employ a variety of approaches, from traditional biography to institutional history to policy and rhetorical analysis. The essays are divided among three chronological sections that roughly follow broad trends identified in disability history. The first, titled "Uses and Contests," sheds light on how the concept of disability functioned and was contested by both society and individuals in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Biographies illustrate how gender and disability intersected, first in the life of Alice James, who molded her "hysterical fits" and various neurological complaints into a particularly feminine identity of an upper-class invalid, and the second in the way a deaf teacher maintained his identity as a "Southern gentleman" by resisting the dependency that was associated with his disability. In the same section, Douglas Baynton argues that the concept of disability illuminates the emancipation of African-Americans and women's suffrage; it was by refuting presumed disabilities that once-marginalized subgroups gained power and franchise. Entitlement came from denying disability, not refuting the idea that disability denied individual entitlement.

The second section, "Redefinitions and Resistance," focuses on debates surrounding the concept of rehabilitation and reintegration during the Progressive Era. These narratives define a period in American history during which vast changes in social policy and improved medical therapeutics shifted the emphasis from "fixing" the environment to "fixing" the disabled individual—although most rehabilitation efforts contained elements of both approaches. As efforts to fix the disabled become rationalized on a large scale, the disabled found themselves displaced from their own advocacy organizations. New medically trained professionals or enterprising philanthropists became the leaders in the public sphere and the "experts" on disability.

The final section, "Images and Identities," presents a collage of institutional, biographical, and legislative histories of disability during the second half of the twentieth century. These narratives are framed by the rise of organized and cross-disability activism, professional lobbying, and the momentum and ideology of the civil rights movement. Still, the idea that disability is a political and cultural category creates problems for historians. The editors acknowledge that it is questionable whether such a tool of analysis can be applied to historical situations wherein this definition of disability would appear foreign and contrived. Disability itself is not, and probably cannot be, rigorously defined in the context of this new mode of analysis. The editors offer instead a fluid, historically...