47 pages • 1 hour read
Kim E. NielsenA Disability History of the United States
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 7-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “We Don’t Want Tin Cups: Laying the Groundwork, 1927-1968”
In Chapter 7, Nielsen examines disability in the years 1927-1968, specifically focusing on the issues of employment and labor relations, community and relationships between different groups of people with disabilities, and organizing and activism. Despite the economic collapse and devastation resulting from the stock market crash of 1929, “the activism of people with disabilities and the federal policy changes generated in response to the Great Depression created new opportunities for people with disabilities” (131). One of the earliest examples of disability activism was the formation of the League of the Physically Handicapped, which began protesting in 1935 for equal access to jobs with the Works Relief Program. The National Association of the Deaf similarly battled the Works Projects Administration, the New Deal agency that employed millions during the Depression, because of its stance that deaf people, like other types of people with disabilities, were unemployable.
Nielsen also examines the ways in which disability-specific communities formed based on activism and common experiences. Chief among these was the deaf community, which had grown strong in the early 20th century because of its common linguistic identity and the many schools that existed. Unlike other types of people with disabilities, however, the deaf community rejected making alliances with other groups because they “insisted that deaf people were not disabled people” (136). Nielsen argues that they “sought to distinguish themselves from those they considered the truly disabled” (136). Survivors of infantile paralysis, or polio, the disease which swept across the United States in the early 20th century and left many with physical disabilities, also formed communities. Many educational reforms that benefited children with disabilities came about because of the activism of parents of polio survivors, and better access to higher education for those with disabilities came about largely because of the activism of polio survivors.
Like all wars before it, World War II greatly increased the number of individuals with disabilities in the United States, but it also had a profound impact on people with disabilities in the workplace. Nielsen explains that “when an exceptional demand for labor arose, there was a significant increase in the employment of disabled workers who compiled impressive records of productivity” (148). From 1940 to 1945, government employment-agency placement of people with disabilities rose from 28,000 to 300,000. With more people with disabilities in the workforce than ever before, new questions and issues arose, as did activist organizations such as the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), the first cross-disability activist organization on the national level, and the Blind Veterans Association (BVA). The AFPH and BVA both began using “the language of discrimination and rights” (154), and both were the first such organizations to recognize the connections between ableism, racism, and sexism. These organizations recognized that “rejecting hierarchy based on one form of physical difference (like disability) while embracing hierarchy based on another form of physical difference (such as race) left one ideologically (and perhaps ethically) inconsistent and made organizing less effective” (156).
Chapter 8 Summary: “I Guess I’m an Activist. I Think It’s Just Caring: Rights and Rights Denied, 1968-”
In Chapter 8, Nielsen expands her discussion of disability activism, focusing on the modern period beginning in the late 1960s. She begins her final chapter with an anecdote about organized labor in the dangerous coal industry of southern West Virginia and uniquely ties together the labor activists who fought to reform it, the anti-war and civil rights activists of the same time, and the disability activists who sought to improve their lives. She argues that
using terms such as ‘rights’ and ‘discrimination,’ and employing the protest methods of the anti-war and racial freedom movements, people with disabilities increasingly, in the late twentieth century, demanded the opportunities and protections of full citizenship (160).
The disability rights movement of the 1970s focused on legal efforts to prohibit discrimination in employment and education, better access to public services, and “institutional transformations that better enabled the self-determination of those with disabilities” (161). Like other socio-political movements of the time, the disability rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s began to unite into a singular movement from previously disparate elements.
Two of the earliest legislative achievements of the disability rights movement were the 1968 Architectural Barriers Act (ABA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Making the argument that access was a rights issue, the ABA was passed, but it had weak enforcement measures and did not apply to public transportation, privately owned commercial spaces, or housing. Driven by the needs of Vietnam veterans, the Rehabilitation Act passed, but its most important element, Section 504, which guaranteed that people with disabilities could not be discriminated against by any program or activity receiving federal funding, was not enforced. By 1977, disability activists had become so frustrated by the government’s failure to enforce Section 504 that they staged sit-in protests, occupying each of the 10 Health, Education, and Welfare offices around the country and in Washington, DC. According to Nielsen, “The Section 504 sit-in exemplifies the ways in which the disability rights movement intersected with and borrowed from the free speech, antiwar, feminist, and racial freedom movements” (168).
In closing her final chapter, Nielsen argues that “disability activism, community, and empowerment grew as people with disabilities increasingly insisted on having a voice in shaping their own lives, the policies that affected them, and the institutions in which they lived, worked, and learned” (179). She says that much of the success of the disability rights movement that blossomed in the late 1960s and early 1970s is owed to the success of other socio-political movements of the same era and to the eventual cross-disability nature of the movement, which occurred only when people with disabilities realized their shared experiences and common goals. While not marking a culminating celebration or the end of the disability rights movement after decades of struggle, the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) is clearly the most well-known piece of legislation that came from the movement. Built on previous legislations from the1960s and 1970s, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the ADA impacted an estimated 43 million people at the time of its passage.
Epilogue Summary
In the brief Epilogue to A Disability History of the United States, Nielsen reflects on her own childhood experience with disability as she remembers 40-mile trips that she took every week for a year for speech therapy. Only decades later, as an adult, did she realize that the trips were to an Easter Seals facility. She writes that her rural Montana county had few social services and no kindergarten program, so her parents turned to Easter Seals, which was primarily privately funded at the time.
Chapter 7-Epilogue Analysis
Over the final two chapters of her work, Nielsen examines disability during the Great Depression, World War II, and the era of disability rights activism in the 1970s and beyond. In addition to the social and political activism that eventually brought about important legislation, the principal issues discussed in Chapters 7 and 8 are employment of people with disabilities and community and organizing among specific groups of people with disabilities. As she had done in the book’s previous sections, Nielsen uses case studies throughout Chapters 7 and 8 to highlight the experiences of specific individuals with disabilities as they relate to the issues being examined.
Nielsen uses concrete economic shifts to analyze The Changing Definitions and Perceptions of Disability. She argues that the Great Depression and World War II impacted American citizens of all types, but their effect on people with disabilities was profound. Policy changes generated in response to the Great Depression, as well as the labor shortage during World War II, created new opportunities for people with disabilities. During World War II, government and industrial policies “encouraged the employment of people with disabilities in order to meet the wartime crisis demands” (146). Nielsen notes that government employment-agency placement of people with disabilities “rose from 28,000 in 1940 to 300,000 in 1945” (148). Additionally, the Barden-LaFollette Act of 1943 provided manual vocational training, higher education opportunities, and physical rehabilitation services. An implicit premise of Nielsen’s analysis, therefore, is that shifting definitions of disability and corresponding ideas about how and whether people with disabilities can participate in the workforce are ultimately linked to concrete economic factors, such as the existence of a labor shortage.
This section of the book also examines The Impact of Legislation and Policy on Individuals With Disabilities through the lens of disability rights groups and the evolution of the disability rights movement. Since these groups advocated for specific legislative and policy changes, their work is a testament to the way that legislation and policy impacted individuals with disabilities. In the final chapter, Nielsen closely examines the disability rights movement in the activist era of the 1960s and 1970s. Nielsen explains that the movement focused on legal efforts to prohibit discrimination in employment and education, access to public spaces and public transportation, and “institutional transformations that better enabled the self-determination of those with disabilities” (161). She begins the chapter with a case study describing how organized labor and disability intersected in the early 1970s when miners with disabilities in southern West Virginia led a wildcat strike. She also describes the historically significant protests around the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and its important Section 504 clause. Section 504 stated that people with disabilities should not be denied the benefits of or discriminated against by any program or activity receiving federal funding. Because Section 504 was never properly enforced, major demonstrations took place in Washington, DC, and each of the 10 Health, Education, and Welfare offices around the country. By recounting the strategic goals of these groups, Nielsen sheds light on the specific legislation and policies that impacted people with disabilities and indicates what concrete changes people with disabilities advocated for.
Nielsen also speaks to The Intersectionality of Disability With Race, Gender, and Class by focusing on the ways that disability rights groups overlapped with other demographics advocating for an expansion of their civil rights. Formed at the height of the Depression because the Works Progress Association and Works Relief Program were discriminating against people with disabilities, the League of the Physically Handicapped “embraced the language, the ideology, and the laws of rights and citizenship in order to advance the claims of people with disabilities” (133). Nielsen also argues that “cross-disability organizations and alliances began, though haltingly and inconsistently, to draw connections between disability, race, and sex discrimination” (133). Founded by labor organizer Paul Strachan, the American Federation of the Physically Handicapped (AFPH), the first cross-disability activist organization, understood disability as a rights, class, and labor issue. The AFPH, which had groups in 89 cities by 1946, is an example of the ways in which disability intersected with labor organizing and activism in the post-World War II period. Nielsen further argues that “the Section 504 sit-in exemplifies the ways in which the disability rights movement intersected with, and borrowed from, the free speech, antiwar, feminist, and racial freedom movements” (168). Nielsen hence presents evidence in support of the claim that the disability rights movement was characterized by an embrace of the intersectionality of disability with race, gender, and class.
