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Thesis ID: CBB001562082

A Vision of Self Support: Disability and the Rehabilitation Movement in Progressive America (2004)

University of Iowa
Stromquist, H. Shelton
Publication date: 2004
Language: English

Publication Date: 2004
Edition Details: Advisor: Stromquist, H. Shelton
Physical Details: 271 pp.

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Rehabilitation Public health Medicine and society Disabilities; disability; accessibility 20th century, early 19th century United States

This thesis provides a historical investigation into Progressive Era efforts to reform the conditions facing physically disabled men, women, and children in the early twentieth century. This ``rehabilitation movement'' produced dozens of hospitals, schools, and convalescent homes for children, along with a national system of vocational rehabilitation for adults. My thesis attempts to explain why this movement evolved, who led it, what they hoped to accomplish, and what impact the movement had upon the social and cultural reality of disability. Consideration is also given to the emergence of the medical model. Scholars often point to this period as the start of a new understanding of disability and illness in which pathological and hereditary considerations replaced religiously informed understandings of impairment. My investigation was based upon the writings of various reformers, many of whom published their ideas in magazines, books, and journals between 1890 and 1920. Some of these were mainstream publications such as _The Outlook, Ladies' Home Journal_, and _American Magazine_. However, I found the most useful sources to be specialty journals produced by institutions and agencies aiding cripples, including _The Hospital School Journal, Carry On_, and _The American Journal of Care for Cripples_. Published investigations by social scientists, such as Edith Reeves _ The Care and Education of Crippled Children in the United States_ (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1914), also proved quite valuable. To a lesser extent, I also made use of the limited number of unpublished annual reports from institutions created by rehabilitation reformers. In investigating this subject I found that middle class businessmen, reform-minded women, orthopedists, disabled people, and others attempted not only to rehabilitate the so-called cripple, but to readjust social attitudes towards people with physical disabilities. Most importantly, they sought to redefine cripples as capable workers rather than as dependent invalids. While I did discover clear signs of an emerging medical model, I also discovered something best described as a social model of disability, in which some reformers blamed society (rather than individual impairment) for the problems facing disabled people.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/04 (2004): 1506. UMI pub. no. 3129285.

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