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A NOTE ON LANGUAGE AND CONTENT

This book repeats some ugly and abusive language that historical actors invented to describe people perceived to have disabilities in the past. Much of this language is specific to the outlook held by physicians, lawmakers, and laypeople who lived in the early twentieth century. In this period, labels such as “feebleminded,” “unfit,” and “defective” had clinical understandings, but these terms were also applied broadly and in derogatory ways to describe people with presumed shortcomings of character. In many examples that appear in this book, historical actors used their language of disability to describe people that we would not consider disabled today.

In No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability 1840s–1930s, historian Sarah F. Rose writes, “the experience of disability, and even what counts as a disability, varies by historical era and culture. The ways in which race, class, gender, age, and kind of impairment … intersect with disability also matter, of course.” In some contexts, it is relevant to emphasize that many of the victims of eugenics and forced sterilization were not disabled according to our contemporary use of the term. But capturing the ways that perceptions of disabilities shift with time and place does not mean the primary injustice of eugenics was that it ensnared so-called “normal people.” Rather, the shifting nature of these perceptions and the realities that followed underscore that there is a long history in America of imprinting racial, gender, and class prejudices onto the concept of disability.

For readers who want more information about these ideas, including the ways that they continue to circulate today, there is a list of suggested resources at the back of this book.