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Becoming Citizens: Family Life and the Politics of Disability is a chronicle of the lives of thirteen families in the Seattle area who raised children with developmental disabilities between 1940 and 1980.

In January 2002 I began working with the Seattle Family Network, a small group of people connected to one another because they each have family members with a developmental disability. They came together to work with an artist to tell the story of the “senior families” in the disability community. This was a generation of parents who, after World War II, went against the conventional medical wisdom of that time and refused to institutionalize their children with significant developmental disabilities or “mental retardation.” Growing up in the community, these children were often denied access to public schools, churches, programs, and medical benefits. At the heart of this document is the story of four mothers turned parent advocates, who, with grass-roots support from all over the country, became the principal authors of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, passed as a Federal law in 1975. This civil rights legislation secures educational rights for every person with a disability in America.

This project explores through interviews and photographs the experience of family life and disability and the ways ordinary citizens become activists.

—Susan Schwartzenberg