Sarah F. Rose. No Right to Be Idle

As its subtitle indicates, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s, makes the kind of social-constructionist argument about disability that became common in historical scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s. In many different fields, scholars deployed words like invention, creation, or discovery to signal that things (e.g., race, ethnic identity, class, sex and sexuality, and disease) commonly regarded as natural, inevitable, and immutable were revealed by historical scholarship to be social, contingent, and subject to change. I begin with this obvious point not to fault this book for being theoretically or methodologically stale, but to make a point about the status of disability in history and the humanities: it is one of the few social categories that still needs this kind of analysis. Sarah F. Rose locates the origins of modern disability in U.S. industrial relations and labor policy between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before this, people who today would be categorized as “disabled” were described by a broad range of terms such as lame, deaf-mute, blind, lunatic, and feebleminded—none of which necessarily implied an inability to do valuable work or to care for oneself. The experience of disability was as diverse as the terminology used to describe it. While some “disabled” were dependent on public aid, most were integrated into their families and communities and contributed some kind of valuable work. This changed as employers, welfare officials, and people with disabilities and their families had to navigate the shifting meanings of work and the demands of wage-labor markets as the U.S. transformed into an industrial society.

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