47 pages • 1 hour read
Kim E. NielsenA Disability History of the United States
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Miserable Wretches Were Then Thrown Into the Sea: The Late Colonial Era, 1700-1776”
Nielsen begins Chapter 3 by discussing the ways in which people dealt with psychological and physical disabilities in the late colonial era. Using anecdotes to cite specific cases, she explains that “first and foremost, families provided care” for individuals with disabilities (31), but people with disabilities became the responsibility of their village or town when families could not or would not provide support. In the cases of revolutionary hero James Otis, Jr., the wife of Patrick Henry, and the sister of Thomas Jefferson, all of whom had psychological disabilities, their families provided care, but in cases in which individuals had no family, people with disabilities frequently entered the domain of “poor laws” (35). While confinement of those exhibiting “madness” was rare and done only when absolutely necessary, by the end of colonial period, people with disabilities regularly resided in almshouses (36). Almshouses not only served as correctional institutions but also were “a general dumping ground for all those unable to support themselves financially” (37). Concerning physical disabilities, Nielsen writes that although bodily variations were routine, the general lack of discussion and institutional acknowledgement of them suggests that “they simply were not noteworthy among communities of European colonists in the period before the Revolution” (39).
For the Indigenous nations of North America during the late colonial period, familial or community care for individuals with disabilities depended on stability, resources, and security. Nielsen argues that “European colonization in North America left few indigenous nations with the ability to provide care on a meaningful and significant scale” (40). While Indigenous nations were being decimated by diseases carried by European settlers in North America, Africans were being brought by force. According to Nielsen, “disability permeated the ideology, experience, and practices of slavery in multiple and profound ways” (42). She explains that because Africans were thought to be inferior, both mentally and physically, enslaved people were by definition disabled. Enslaved people who actually had physical, cognitive, or psychological disabilities were considered “damaged goods” and difficult to sell, meaning that these so-called “refuse slaves” typically resulted in a loss of profit for traders of enslaved people (46). Nielsen argues that “for those brought to North America by force and trapped in the slave trade, disability often meant being consigned the status of ‘refuse,’ which frequently resulted in abandonment and death” (47).
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Deviant and Dependent: Creating Citizens, 1776-1865”
In the years following the American Revolution, the concept of disability began to be used to legally justify inequality. Nielsen says that “perceived intellect, bodily capacity, race, class, gender, ethnicity, and circumstance all intersected to determine one’s civic competency” (52). Establishing disability as a legal and social welfare category, the Revolutionary War Pension Act of 1818 used the 19th-century definition of disability to determine that certain physical impairments did not necessarily render one disabled and unable to perform labor. In the decades before mass industrialization, large numbers of veterans with disabilities worked as farmers or were employed as skilled laborers and found their community lives to be markedly similar to veterans without disabilities. While many white men with disabilities were seen as citizens because they performed labor, the same could not be said for women and enslaved African Americans, who “could not own their own labor” in the same way (56). According to Nielsen, “given that disability was defined as the inability to labor, white women, free African American women, and slaves came to be associated with the disabled” (56).
Participation in civic and community life required not only economic productivity but also perceived intelligence and competence. People widely held the view that both enslaved and free African Americans lacked such intelligence and competence and thus were disabled. Many medical experts in the 19th century became proponents of scientific racism, the belief that biological and physiological factors prove racial superiority. While some used this concept of disability to justify slavery, abolitionists used it to argue against it, implying that enslaved people would no longer be disabled when they were freed. Issues concerning disability became more prominent during the antebellum period of the 19th century as questions about citizens’ bodies began appearing on the US census. Nielsen explains that the 1830 census recorded numbers of deaf, blind, and “dumb” residents for the first time, and the 1840 census added a question about “insane and idiot” residents (64). It was in this period that reformers began to recognize disability as a social problem that required a response. Nielsen points out that beginning in New England, but later spreading south and westward, public and private groups “nearly fell over one another in efforts to establish insane asylums, schools for deaf and blind people, community hospitals for those in poverty, and schools for the ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘idiots’” (66).
Among the first of these institutions was the American Asylum for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, which opened in 1817. Many of the earliest schools were part of the wave of evangelical Protestantism that swept across the nation in the early 19th century and were “guided by the mission of using sign language to share Christianity with those formerly isolated from its blessings” (67). With the expansion of schools and growing communities throughout the 19th century, “literacy, education rates, and economic success rates for deaf people rose significantly” (67). Just as understandings of disability were transformed in the post-Revolutionary War period, so too were understandings of cognitive disabilities and mental illness, as “theological and supernatural explanations of madness began to be replaced by biological explanations” (68). Along with this transformation, efforts to treat mental illness and cognitive disabilities through institutionalization rose drastically. Whereas confinement was used during the colonial period only when one was considered dangerous, institutionalization became common in the 19th century because of a belief that those considered “idiots” could be educated (71).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
In Chapters 3 and 4, Nielsen examines the late colonial era of the 18th century and the post-Revolutionary War period of the 19th century. Her primary focus in these chapters is on the community and national response to disability and the intersectionality of disability with race, class, and gender. Using a number of case studies concerning famous citizens with disabilities of the late colonial era in Chapter 3, she describes how care for people with disabilities slowly transitioned from a family and community concern to a national one. In Chapter 4, she describes how the characteristics of disability, race, class, and gender were intertwined as factors preventing full citizenship.
This section of the text further underscores The Impact of Legislation and Policy on Individuals With Disabilities. While “the general lack of discussion and institutional acknowledgement of physical disabilities” during the late colonial era suggests that they were routine and not noteworthy (39), psychological and cognitive disabilities became a concern for communities. As had been the case in the previous century, families provided care first and foremost, but communities took responsibility when that option did not exist. Nielsen provides several case studies in Chapter 3, detailing examples of specific individuals who were cared for either by family members or by their communities or towns. In this period, legislation and policy concerning care for those with disabilities began to take root. Although almshouses became a “general dumping ground for all those unable to support themselves financially” (37), they also served the purpose of providing safe confinement for people with psychological disabilities. Nielsen explains that “a perception of the need for care or confinement, rather than diagnosis […] drove this early development of institutionalization” (37). Nielsen thereby connects evolutions in legislation and policy regarding people with disabilities to The Changing Definitions and Perceptions of Disability. Specifically, she argues that it was the fact that people began to view people with disabilities as in need of institutional care and formal education that precipitated legislative and policy shifts.
In Chapter 4, Nielsen closely examines The Intersectionality of Disability With Race, Gender, and Class. She argues that “disability, as a concept, was used to justify legally established inequalities” in the post-Revolutionary War period (50). African Americans, both those enslaved and free, were seen as inferior specimens and thus disabled, while women were “legal nonentities determined unfit for civic life” (50). People of Indigenous nations and people whose bodies and minds were seen as defective or deficient were also contrasted with those “considered worthy of full citizenship” (50). According to Nielsen, “perceived intellect, bodily capacity, race, class, gender, ethnicity, and circumstance all intersected to determine one’s civic competency” (52). Nielsen thus links popular ideas regarding race, gender, and disability to political claims about who warrants inclusion in the body politic. Her analysis ties into claims about the linkages between historical prejudice and conceptions of who is deemed worthy of “full citizenship.” According to these accounts, women, people of color, and people with disabilities were deprived of full civil rights on the grounds that they somehow lacked the requisite qualities for full citizenship (e.g., they were deemed not sufficiently rational). Nielsen’s text corroborates this claim by tracing the way that disability was cited as a reason to deny full citizenship.
Beyond showing that there was an intersectional link between disability, gender, race, and class, Nielsen also provides a reason for why this intersectional link existed. She states that, just as with the late colonial period, the definition of disability in the post-Revolutionary War period was the inability to labor. This set up a legal and intellectual framework for civic competency in which women, along with free and enslaved African Americans, came to be associated with people with disabilities. Because a competent citizenry was seen as vital for the new American democracy, disability, along with race, gender, and class, “became one ideological means by which to adjudicate worthy citizenship” (75). Unfit bodies and minds became reasons for disability-based voting exclusions implemented by various states. Similar exclusions became standard based on property ownership as well, meaning that gender and class became intersected with race and disability in determining which individuals were worthy of full citizenship.
