No right to be idle: the invention of disability, 1840s–1930s

It has long been argued that the advent of industrial capitalism in the western world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a significant detrimental impact on the employment prospects and citizenship of disabled people. However, as Sofie de Veirman (2015) argued in this journal, there have been few attempts to study in detail how this process happened, or to document through empirical research the changing work opportunities of disabled men and women. Work on both sides of the Atlantic is now making good this neglect, and in No Right to be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s, Sarah F. Rose presents a deeply researched analysis of disabled people’s experiences in industrialising America.

Rose’s argument is that around the turn of the twentieth century, disabled people were increasingly cast as unproductive and dependent on charity, in spite of their willingness to work. This was in part a consequence of the rise of mechanised factory labour that both increased the demand for workers who had ‘intact, interchangeable bodies’ and reduced families’ capacity to take care of and make use of the labour of ‘partly productive relatives’ (2). It was also an unintended consequence of reforms intended to make better provision for disabled workers, chiefly workmen’s compensation schemes that were designed to offer support for people injured in the workplace, but instead served to discourage employers and their insurers from taking the ‘risk’ of hiring people with impairments. Through this process, the equation of ‘disability’ with inability to work was made.

Rose begins her study with a discussion of the work experience of ‘idiots’ inside and outside asylums between the 1840s and the 1870s. In nineteenth-century America, ‘idiocy’ was an elastic category that included people with diverse physical and mental capacities, not simply those who would later be labelled ‘feeble-minded’. In spite of emerging eugenic ideas that saw ‘idiots’ as parasitic dependents whose ‘immorality’ threatened the fabric of their communities and American society as a whole, asylums sought to provide training in self-care and vocational skills that would allow their inmates to return to their families and be economically productive. ‘Idiots’ were placed on a spectrum of productivity that varied according to age, gender and ability. However, by the 1880s and 1890s, the focus of asylums had shifted towards providing permanent custodial care for the ‘feeble minded’. While eugenic ideas underpinned this institutional refocusing, it was also a consequence of the growing ‘business’ of charity, and of increasing urbanisation and industrialisation. The view of the ‘idiot’ as an unproductive burden on her or his family hardened during this period. Despite the work of more enlightened institutional superintendents, such as Charles Bernstein at the Rome State Custodial Asylum, New York, who paroled out some male and female inmates to gain the vocational, social and practical skills needed to live independently, by the early twentieth century many people with intellectual and other impairments had become permanent residents of asylums.

The growing importance of mechanised factory labour between the 1880s and 1920s affected the employment prospects of all people with disabilities, not just asylum inmates. While injuries had been an accepted part of work in the early stages of industrialisation and were not regarded as signs of unproductivity, the growing demand for workers with ‘intact, fully functional bodies’, who ‘like the items they produced could be used as interchangeable parts’ (122), made it harder for disabled workers to retain their place in the labour market. There were some notable exceptions: the Ford Motor Company took a positive approach to hiring disabled workers, seeing them as no different in their capacity for productivity to non-disabled people, provided that work could be matched to their abilities. However, by the 1920s, Safety First campaigns and workers’ compensation schemes gave employers sceptical of hiring disabled workers greater incentives to exclude them. Even Goodwill Industries, founded by Edgar James Helms to provide sheltered workshops for older and disabled workers, followed the principles of piecework and efficiency that made mainstream workplaces disabling.

While setting out broad changes in the economic prospects of disabled workers, Rose shows how experiences could vary. In the nineteenth century, farm work, which had traditionally relied on the labour of all family members, provided greatest economic opportunities for disabled people, but there was more work for men than for women. Disabled ex-servicemen returning from the First World War were treated with much greater good will than disabled citizens trying to find work, although disabled African-American veterans faced more barriers to employment than their white counterparts. Rose also demonstrates how the changing nature of disability itself after the First World War, with an increase of mental trauma and chronic pain, made older models for conceptualising disability in relation to productive capacity harder to sustain.

If No Right to be Idle confirms a familiar hypothesis in disability studies, namely that industrial capitalism led to disabled people’s economic marginalisation, it is the depth and subtlety of Rose’s analysis and her thorough engagement with a wide range of sources – from asylum papers to company records – that sets her work apart from previous work on the subject. Industrialisation was a complex and uneven process, and more comparative work is needed to understand how disabled people fared in other countries and in different sectors of the economy. Sarah F. Rose’s fine book is a model for future studies of historical relationships between disability and work.

David M. Turner
Department of History, Swansea University, Swansea, UK
[email protected]
© 2018 David M. Turner
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2018.1471816