"The reason that people with disabilities are often thought to have had no history is really that they've had no recorded history... It's been partly because society has denied that there was anything important to be learned. It was partly because, as with any minority group, the people were so of the Other that they were never given any of the tools to record any aspects of their history... So, people with disabilities have followed the paths of people of color, and women, of trying to reclaim what has long been lost."
– Irving Zola
– Irving Zola
Ancient Greece and Rome
"With regard to the choice between abandoning an infant or rearing it, let there be a law that no crippled child be reared". - Aristotle The Greeks and Romans idealized humans with perfect physiques. "From these beliefs arose the enduring idea that 'good' looked beautiful and the deformed and disabled were 'bad'." - British Film Institute on Disabling Imagery
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The Middle Ages
"At times of social upheaval, plague or pestilence, disabled people were often made scapegoats as sinners or evil people who brought the disasters upon society". - British Institute on Disabling Imagery "Churches organized services for people with disabilities within their congregations and homes. [But] many Christians held superior attitudes towards people with disabilities which resulted in a general loss of autonomy. To many, disability represented impurity". - Maggie Shreve, consultant to Community Resources for Independence, a branch of the Independent Living Movement |
The Renaissance
"The Age of Enlightenment [from the 13th to 18th] centuries led to a belief in the scientific method and that ‘Man’ could tame and control nature. Anatomy and the development of medical science became obsessed with putting new knowledge into curing and normalising disabled people. Impairment became the focus." - A Human Rights Approach to Developing Equality, the Disability Equality and Education Organization
The 19th Century
The public view of the disabled began to change in the 1800s. "Children's stories introduced stereotypes about people with disabilities to Americans at a young age by portraying them as either objects of pity or brave and courageous for summoning the will to live in such circumstances". - Ashley Wiseman, physically disabled Such ideas degraded the disabled. |
Remote institutions, built for the disabled, "detained [them] for the whole of their lives" to "stem the great evil of feeble-mindedness in this country". - Mary Dendy, eugenicist “I proceed, gentlemen, to call your attention to the present state of insane persons confined within this Commonwealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens; chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.”
- Dorothy Dix (1844), crusader for disability rights |
The American colonies prohibited the immigration of "any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge".
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"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feebleminded classes, coupled with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a race danger. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed"
- Winston Churchill |
Thousands were forcibly serialized during the eugenics movement.
"Prevention of births [is an act] of genocide when committed as part of a policy to destroy a group’s existence."
- Prevent Genocide International
- Prevent Genocide International
Small Successes
"The 19th century saw few organizations with equality for people with disabilities as their focus, although the founding of the American School for the Deaf in 1817 was a crucial milestone acknowledging the importance of access to education and literacy." - ABILITY Magazine, 2005
These small successes set up the basis for the equality movement to come.