People with disabilities cannot work, right? So have claimed politicians since the early 20th century. But how did people with disabilities become defined as “unproductive citizens,” as lazy dependents in dire need of retraining and rehabilitation? Such rhetoric does not reflect the reality that, historically speaking, disability is normal—in fact, being disabled is a standard part of the human experience and life course. Indeed, people with amputations, feeble-mindedness, tuberculosis, blindness, rheumatism, and many other disabilities had long worked. Certain injuries even served as a sign of experience and cool-headedness on the job. But by the 1920s, people with many different types and origins of disabilities, both acquired and congenital, found themselves pushed out of the paid labor market, thanks in part to shifting family structures and policies that sought to deter dependency, such as workmen’s compensation. Although disabled people continued to seek work, increasingly for minimal or no pay, employers and lawmakers now read their bodies in new ways: as abnormal and inherently unproductive.

Sarah Rose, Ph.D. is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she directs the Minor in Disability Studies and is helping to build UTA Libraries’ Texas Disability History Collection. Her book, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2017 and was awarded the 2017 award for Excellence in Research Using the Holdings of the State Archives by the New York State Archives and Archives Partnership Trust. She has published on “Work” in Keywords for Disability Studies and on “‘Crippled’ Hands: Disability in Labor and Working-Class History” in LABOR: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas. Rose and Joshua A. T. Salzmann’s essay, “Bionic Ballplayers: Risk, Profit, and the Body as Commodity, 1964-2007,” received LABOR’s best article prize for 2014-2015.