1. Miriam Rich,
Women’s Reproductive Anxieties and Imaginaries of Disability in the Progressive Era (
[email protected])
2. Emma Wathen,
“Stop Being a Polio Patient, Be a Mother”: Polio Mothers and Parenting Narratives in the Postwar United States (
[email protected])
This panel brings together work from historians who study disability and reproduction in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Histories of reproduction in the United States have often overlooked disability as an analytical category and disabled people as reproductive agents. In line with disability studies scholarship, the collective work of these historians positions disability as both a discourse that has been used to create and defend racial and gender hierarchies, and a lived experience that shaped the reproductive lives of many women in the United States. Examining the portraits, letters, and memoirs of mothers with and without disabilities, this panel explores how American mothers in different eras contended with (and sometimes countered) ableism, whether through fears about congenital disability or assumptions about the maternal fitness of visibly and publicly disabled women. It calls attention to the ways race, gender, and class intersected with disability. Analyzing the active and intentional demonstration of deafness and motherhood in the portrait of Eliza Clerc, Hull demonstrates the imperative role that d/Deaf women like Clerc had in the creation of American Sign Language, the foundation of the American Deaf community, and the advent of deaf education in the nineteenth-century United States. Turning to the Progressive Era, Miriam Rich explores how lay discourse on reproduction encoded complex and contested imaginaries of congenital disability, becoming a site where diverse women worked out questions and anxieties related to racial descent, gendered family structures, environmental determinants of development, and disabled motherhood. Finally, Emma Wathen investigates how, in the wake of the Salk vaccine, American “polio mothers” called attention to the continuing reproductive needs of polio survivors and reinforced their belonging within the status quo of the white, middle-class nuclear family at a time when women with disabilities were widely deemed to be unfit wives and mothers. Foregrounding disability and disabled people, this panel highlights innovative work from emerging scholars in the fields of disability and reproductive history.
Chair email:
[email protected]
