DISABILITY AND THE JUSTIFICATION OF INEQUALITY

“Disability [is] marker of hierarchical relations.” (34)

“Disability has functioned to justify inequality for disabled
people themselves, but it has also done so for women
and minority groups.” (33)

Baynton cites three examples:



Women’s suffrage
African American freedom and civil rights
Restriction of immigrants (33)
CONSTRUCTING RACE AND DISABILITY

Images of American blacks have commonly
shown them with exaggerated lips, amusingly
long or bowed legs, grotesquely big feet, bad
posture, missing teeth, crossed or bulging eyes,
and otherwise deformed bodies.” (40)
CONSTRUCTING GENDER AND DISABILITY
Anti-suffragists argued that women were
mentally deficient and thus not equal to the
responsibilities of full citizenship
 frail, irrational, and given to emotional excesses
 “like racial and ethnic minorities, women were
said to be less evolved than white men, their
disabilities the result of lesser evolutionary
development.” (41)

CONSTRUCTING IMMIGRANTS AS DISABLED
1882 Immigration Law “prohibited entry to any
‘lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care
of himself or herself without becoming a public
charge.’” (45)
 In 1907, “imbeciles” and “feeble-minded
persons” were added to the list of excluded
groups (46)


The charge that certain ethnic groups were
mentally and physically deficient was
instrumental in arguing for their exclusion. (47)
 The
“slow-witted Slav”
 The “neurotic condition of our Jewish immigrants”
 The “degenerate and psychopathic types, which are
so conspicuous and numerous amonf rhe
immigrants.” (47)
“TWO IMMIGRANTS OUT OF FIVE FEEBLEMINDED”

“If you had gone over to Ellis Island shortly
before the war began and placed your hand at
random on one of the aliens waiting to be
examined by government inspectors, you would
very likely have found that your choice was
feebleminded.”

“The standard would seem to be too low for
prospective American citizens.” -- Goddard
IMPAIRMENT OF APPEARANCE---IMPAIRMENT OF FUNCTION


“no one can stand at Ellis Island and see the physical
and mental wrecks who are stopped there . . . without
becoming a firm believer in restriction.” (48)
“South Europeans run to low stature, A gang of Italian
navvies filing along the street present, by their
dwarfishness, a curious contrast to other people. The
Portuguese, the Greeks, and the Syrians are, from our
point of view, undersized. The Hebrew immigrants are
very poor in physique . . . the polar opposite of our
pioneer breed.” (48)
EUGENICS AND RACIALIZED NOTIONS OF BEAUTY
We want ugly women in America and we are getting them in
millions… [T]hree or four shiploads have been landing at Ellis Island
every week….
Examine these women as they are unloaded at Ellis Island. I
have studied thousands of them…. They are broad-hipped, short,
stout-legged with big feet; broad-backed, flat-chested with necks like
a prize-fighter and with faces expressionless and devoid of beauty.
-Albert Wiggam, Fruit of the Family Tree (1924)
Wiggam contrasts such “draft horses: and “the beautiful women of
the old American stocks, the Daughter s of the American Revolution.”
Quoted in Martin Pernick, The Black Stork (1996), 64.
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THE CONCEPT OF
NORMALITY
Normal “functioned as an ideal” and was
“implicitly defined as that which advanced
progress.” (36)
 Defective was the opposite of normal. It was
“below average” and it “pulled humanity back
toward its animal origins.” (36)
 At the 1904 World’s Fair, displays of “defectives”
alongside “primitives” signaled similar and
interconnected classification schemes for both
defective people and defective races.” (36)

“THE BURDEN OF FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS”
“a causative factor in the production of crime,
prostitution, pauperism, illegitimacy,
intemperance and other complex social
diseases.”
 “The hereditary cases [of feeblemindedness]
are the most numerous.”
 Even in “accidental or environmental” cases,
“The real origin of the disease lies in the defect
of the germ plasm.”

“UNTO THE THIRD GENERATION”


“[T]he daughter went to the
almshouse. Let no one
suppose that this was tragic
for her. Suffering comes only
with intelligence, a sense of
shame only with the power
to grasp an ideal, and to
realize that we have fallen
below it. In her case, both
conditions were wanting.”
“The young woman was
perfectly honest, strong,
willing, and trainable in
household affairs.”
DISABILITY AND EUGENICS
IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY FILM
Advertisement for the The
Black Stork in the Chicago
Herald Tribune, April 1, 1917
The Black Stork – Examining the Baby
The Black Stork - Haiselden with a patient , 1917
Still from The Black Stork -Vision of childhood
rejection, 1917
Still from The Black Stork - Claude and Anne's baby closeup



In successful social species the functions of the
individual must be subordinated to the best interest of
the race. If surgical interference in a case will be to the
detriment of society, such interference would be
antisocial. If the progress of surgery is to be used to the
detriment of the race... it may conceivably destroy the
race.
Charles B. Davenport,Director of the Carnegie Station for
Experimental Evolution and of the Eugenics Records
Office.
Handicapped from birth to death, what but pain, shame,
humiliation and distress awaits them.
 Edward Berwick.