[When I lay it out like that it looks so sad and boring. This is the bit where I get to do what I want, in the archives! Looking at letters and school records! I get to apply theories and see if they work, and maybe even develop my own! This is totally my idea of how to have a fun summer! Also, the archives are air-conditioned, which helps.]

My particular project is focusing on the development of residential schools for blind and deaf children and youths. I’m looking at how and why they were founded, what their teaching methods were, and who they hired to work there. I’m also looking at the types of jobs that these children were trained for, and what that says about the way disabled children were perceived by society at large in Nineteenth Century Canada.

I’m also wondering exactly how many blind piano tuners and deaf printing-press operators the province of Nova Scotia thought it could support.

I’ve written before that the history I do is explicitly political. It’s partly about a part of our past that is highly neglected, and partly about arguing, simply by doing it, that this history is important, that it has long-term consequences that we’re still feeling.

But I also write it because people with disabilities have a past, a present, and a future. Because we’re important enough that having a history that’s not just focused on a few Great Examples – Helen Keller, Louise Braille, Beethoven, Terry Fox – isn’t enough. Because knowing how things turned out in the past might give us some insight into how things might be in the future.

Another reason I’m doing this is because it challenges people, and asks them to think.

Every time I tell people I’m doing disability history, “centering the experiences of people with disabilities in the historic narrative”, they are taken aback. They’re surprised. Just by doing history in my department, and telling people how awesome my research is, I’m making more of them think about disability, and about people with disabilities. Without ever having a conversation about language, people in my department have stopped referring to people doing unthinkable things as “mentally insane”. Without my ever leading a classroom discussion about theory and frameworks, my classmates discussed the assumptions about disability presented in several of the readings we did.

These are small things. If I’m lucky, I’ve made 30 to 40 people reconsider their ideas of disability and think about people with disabilities in the past.

And yet, these small things are so satisfying.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

I encourage you today to check out Gender Across Border’s Blog(swarm) for International Women’s Day. Throughout the day, the GAB editorial board (including Emily Heroy, Colleen Hodgetts, Jessica Mack, Carrie Polansky, Erin Rickard, Elizabeth Switaj and Tatiana McKinney) will be updating GAB to highlight particular posts. It’s never too late to participate!

There were two themes, and I, of course, took this one:

Describe a particular organization, person, or moment in history that helped to mobilize a meaningful change in equal rights for all.

I think it’s fairly clear that I admire Helen Keller, and resent the way what she did with her life has been reduced to parody, the subject of infantile jokes about people who are Deaf-Blind, and forgotten about. When people bother to tell bits of her story, about her learning words at a well after weeks of patient tutoring from Anne Sullivan, it becomes a form of Inspiration that’s based entirely on pity. Oh, how tragic her life could have been, shrouded in darkness and silence. And then she learned to speak! And all was well!

I’m going to interrupt this post to point you towards a previous one I wrote about Keller: Feminist Icons

[This part is actually quoted from the book Lies my Teacher Told Me.]

Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps. She began by working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realize that to deal solely with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause. Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see. Keller’s research was not just book-learning: “I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it.”

I think Helen Keller changed the world, or at least did an awful lot of work towards changing it. But, even with focusing on her achievements, on her work, it’s important to put her in context.

Helen Keller was a white middle-class woman from the US. She was young and pretty and very talented. Before she became famous as The Deaf-Blind Girl (because, of course, there can only be one Deaf-Blind Girl, and she is always white), Laura Bridgman was The Deaf-Blind Girl. And Bridgman was not as pretty, not as nice, and not as accomplished as Keller.

I mention Laura Bridgman because, if the whole purpose of the Helen Keller Narrative was Nice Deaf-Blind Girl Does Good (and thus you, gentle reader, should put your life in proper perspective!), then Bridgman fits almost the same bill. She learned to read and write, wrote letters to her fans, was on public display with ribbons to hide her eyes, and was just as famous as Keller. So why is our dominant narrative Keller and not Bridgman?

Well, what better way to discount someone’s radical roots than to turn them into an Inspiring Story, and nothing more?

So, for International Women’s Day, I want to remind readers that there are certain stories that we tell about certain women, and that these stories have a purpose.

Perhaps we can subvert that.

Check out Gender Across Borders throughout the day for more posts. A list of participating blogs

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

I’m reading The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, by Robert Darnton. I’ve just finished the first chapter, which makes some interesting arguments about folk tales and their use in determining what non-elites/peasants thought about… well, anything in a time period where most of them lived nasty, brutish and short, unrecorded lives.

His argument is basically that one cannot just look at folktales – whether raw, or prettied up for modern audiences, or in translation or whatever – and determine much of anything. Instead, one needs to do two things: First, one needs to look at all the surviving folktales, all the variations, and pick up the themes. Second, one needs to compare those themes to the themes one gets from folktales in other regions. It’s only in the comparison of themes that one can sort anything, and even then it’s feeling around in the dark and hoping you can sort out the elephant from the cake.

ANYWAY, what I find very interesting (as an historian who looks for hints and tips of history of disability) is where people are totally talking about disability while at the same time dismissing it or not even acknowledging it.

It’s problematic, of course, to try and apply our modern notions of disability to the past and call it good. Even the concept of disability didn’t really exist the way it does now until sometime around the industrial revolution, and there are tons of examples of people being described by contemporaries in ways that modern audiences would consider “disabled”, but that’s never anyone’s concern. So, you’ll read in the past people described as taking to their beds for months at a time, having tics and the like, but no one remarks on it as anything other than just how that particular person is.

So, in a more formal review of A Midwife’s Tale, I wrote this:

There are ten references that could be read as an opportunity to discuss mental health in A Midwife’s Tale. Ulrich mentions four people who are considered insane by the people around them – John Howard is described on page 67 as having “sank into hopeless insanity”; Rebecca Foster is “mentis inops” according to a letter outlined on page 127; and both Tabitha and Mary Sewall are described by Ulrich as suffering from “mental illness” or derangement on page 260. Three people commit suicide, including James Purrington. One of Ballard’s patients seems to suffer from post-partum depression, while Ballard herself describes her mental state as one that reads as familiar to many people with depression on page 226.

There are a variety of reasons the author might not have gone into that discussion – the one I think is going on is that the book was published in 1990 and there was even less discussion of disability in history then than there is now – but it did stand out to me.

The Great Cat Massacre does something a bit different though, at least in the first chapter.

In describing what French peasant did when hard times were really hard, Darnton writes:

…life on the road meant ceaseless scavenging for food. The drifters raided chicken coops, milked untended cows, stole laundry drying on hedges, snipped of horses’ tails (good for selling to upholsterers), and lacerated and disguised their bodies in order to pass as invalids wherever alms were being given out. … They became smugglers, highwaymen, pickpockets, prostitutes. And in the end they surrendered in hopitaux, pestilential poor houses, or else crawled under a bush or a hay loft and died…

(pg 26)

Yes, of course Darnton. You describe a life of abject misery and back-breaking labour, so obviously people faked being disabled all the time.

Throughout this first chapter he says things like (in describing a folktale) “…two discharged soldiers draw lots to see which shall have his eyes put out. Desperate for food, they can think of no way to survive except by operating as a team of beggars, the blind man and his keeper” (pg 38), describes Simple Simon as “the harmless village idiot” (pg 40), talks about Rapunzel’s lover being blinded (pg 52), and witches adding additional hunches to hunchbacked beggars just because (pg 53).

And yet, obviously people faked being disabled all the time. Because there was nothing going on that might lead to actual disabilities.

I know, it’s a throw-away comment in a book originally published in 1984 (disability-focused history is more accepted now – we even have an association), but it bugs me. It’s not a unique occurrence, and it’s difficult to know quite how to respond.

For me, of course, the thing it does most is highlight people’s biases. When I previously tried to discuss this in a class, I could not actually get the professor to understand my complaint. “But people do fake disabilities all the time!” was her response, and there are only so many hours in a day one can give towards advocacy work.

But people with disabilities are quite common in the literature, if you actually pay attention to it.

Related:

Disability Social History Project
Disability Studies, Temple U Blog
Greg Carrier on Medieval Disability
Debilitas Mentis

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

This is, of course, completely untrue ¹, but there was a concentrated effort to ensure that Keller’s accomplishments were ignored. “Radical Marxist” isn’t as nice a story as “deaf-blind woman overcomes”.

If you learned about Helen Keller in school at all, you probably learned the same pablum-esque story I did: Keller was a horrible brat of a child who screamed and kicked and was bad. Then, Anne Sullivan, that angelic woman, came along and, through her virtuous patience, finally got Keller to learn. She stuck Keller’s hand under the well water, and spelled “water” into her hand. And suddenly, Keller learned that “water” meant this stuff pouring over her hand. And then many years later she graduated from Radcliff College, and this is why all the students in my class should try their hardest, because look at how much Helen Keller accomplished, The End. ²

This idea of Keller is so pervasive that even books written about Keller in her lifetime – books that she wrote the introduction for – include the same story. To be vain and quote an essay I wrote last semester:

The only blind person who is given any voice or agency within the work [Ishbel Ross' Journey Into Light: The Story of the Education of the Blind] is Helen Keller, who wrote the forward for the book, and is presented as “[rising] above her triple handicap to become one of the best-known characters in the modern world.” … [D]espite dedicating a whole chapter to Keller, Ross makes no mention of Keller’s politics or activism, instead describing Keller’s grace, “agelessness”, and book collection.

No mention of her membership in the Wobblies ³. I guess that didn’t fit the narrative.

I learned about Helen Keller’s actual life story by reading the book Lies my Teacher Told Me. ⁴ It’s a book that’s a bit hard for me to evaluate properly because I went to school in Canada and it’s focused on American education and teaching. The section Keller appears in (cleverly titled “handicapped by history”) talks about hero-building and erasing things that add complications in our respected leaders. About Keller, Loewen writes:

Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps. She began by working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realize that to deal solely with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause. Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see. Keller’s research was not just book-learning: “I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it.”

At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet. She soon became the most notorious. Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity – this time outraged. Newspapers that had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap. Columnists charged that she had no independent sensory input, and was in thrall to those who fed her information. Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote that Keller’s “mistakes spring out of the manifest limitation of her development.”

Keller recalled having met the editor: “At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I Have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him” She went on: “On, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.” ⁵

Among other things, Keller helped found the American Civil Liberties Union, donated money to the NAACP, supported birth control, was part of the women’s suffrage movement, and spent time in Halifax. ⁶

When we talk about Women’s History – and I understand Women’s History month is in March in the US⁷, so that’s not too long from now – we are doing something wrong if we do not include the lives of women with disabilities. Helen Keller isn’t the only woman with disabilities who has been ignored, erased, or sanitized for public consumption – it happens over and over, to queer women, to women of colour, to women who are ‘marked’ as ‘not-mainstream’.

I think we can do better than this. I think we’re brave enough to not only confront that important women of our past participated in and encouraged others to participate in abuse, neglect, genocide of certain groups of women, but also brave enough to celebrate histories outside the mainstream.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

Reminders of the immediate relevance of history to contemporary issues of disability confront us daily. In but the latest example, as we write these words [in 2001], the United States Supreme Court has accepted appeals from several states which claim that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority in imposing the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] on the states. Congress lacked evidence to prove that state governments had engaged in a historical pattern of discrimination against persons with disabilities, this argument claims in part; without evidence of state discrimination, the general government overran its jurisdiction. The essays gathered here indicate that evidence of discrimination against disabled people reaches well beyond our living recollection. Until we can document the past with the evidence and rigor that solid historical research necessitates, the absence of disability from our written history, its suppression in our formal collective memory, jeopardizes the current quest of Americans with disabilities for full citizenship. This history matters, and not in the abstract.

- Paul K. Longmore & Lauri Umansky, The New Disability History: American Perspectives, pg 14. Sadly, there is no limited preview of this book on Google Books, but Why I Burned By Book and other essays on disability, by Longmore, does have limited preview, and I love that book to pieces, especially the last essay.

Obviously I have quoted this for truth because I’m an historian and I’m often questioned on why I consider the history I do to be both political and activist in nature. And, this is (in part) why.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

My name is Laurent Clerc. I am eighty-three years old. My hair is white, my skin wrinkled and scarred, my posture crooked; I shuffle when I walk. Undoubtedly my life will soon end in this time and place: 1896, Hartford, Connecticut. I spend most of my day sitting alone at my dining room window, looking at my orchard and remembering. I also read the paper and occasionally friends come to visit. I know what’s going on. Important people, distinguished gentlemen, are repudiating the cause to which I have devoted my life. Endowed with the sacred trust of my people’s welfare, they seek, without consulting us, to prevent our worship, marriage, and procreation, to stultify our education, and to banish our mother tongue simply because our way and our language are different from theirs….

- Lane, Harlan, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf, pg 3.

I have issues with Lane. He outright states in his introduction that he made stuff up when he couldn’t find out what happened, and I feel he wrote well-researched historical fiction rather than an actual history book.

But still. Lane didn’t write the first book about deafness from the POV of actual deaf people (Lane is Hearing – he cites Jack R Gannon’s book as the first history written by someone who was Deaf), but he wrote the one that launched a thousand ships, so to speak. He challenged, quite viciously, the idea that deafness was something to be “conquered”, and argued that a deaf-focused history was necessary.

Just as hearing people assumed, and taught the deaf, that the deaf community had no language of its own but at best a manual variant of spoken language, so they assumed, and taught the deaf, that they had no history in their own right but only at best a chapter in a hearing history (generally entitled “Educating the Deaf”).

A couple of very interesting things happened in the 80s. Lane’s book was published in 1984, 24 years after Stokoe successfully argued that Sign was an actual Language. In 1986, Children of a Lesser God was released, and Marlee Matlin became the youngest recipient of the Best Actress Award for her portrayal of a Deaf woman and her Hearing lover. In 1988, the students at Gallaudet University staged their Deaf President Now! protests, demanding an actual Deaf person be president of the university for the first time in its history. The four-day protests brought more attention to the issues of Deafness and Deaf Culture, beyond “cochlear implants”.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the paperback of Lane’s book was published in 1989.

Lane’s book seems to come from a place of anger, and I think that’s a good thing. His anger allows him to speak quite passionately and clearly about why he finds this erasure of deaf history and culture to be a bad thing. His position as a Hearing psychologist and linguist allows him to look “unbiased”, the way men are seen as unbiased about women’s rights, and white folks are supposedly dispassionate arbitrators of what is “really” racist. He is given the space, with his professional credentials and respected history, to talk about Deafness in a way that Hearing people will respect.

I have a time line of books I’m looking at for this part of my historiography paper. I think it’s clear that Lane opened the door, and a lot of people have gone through, further refining the analysis of Deafness and Deaf history.

This is the sort of thing that historiography is about. Looking at how certain works have had a profound influence, and how they are different from what went on before. Lane basically tells everyone that this conquering rhetoric needs to end. Everyone since him has been writing as though that’s now a generally accepted fact, and the questions need to be answered through that lens.

Now, if only I could write that in academic-speak, in about 2000 words.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

Anyway, I have been encouraged to post some of my thoughts about history & disability as I am working away at my thesis.

One of the aspects of writing a history thesis is the historiography part of your work. Basically, you write something that indicates not only that you understand the scholarship that has gone on before, but where your work will fit in with that scholarship.

My thesis adviser described it to me as going to a party. Before barreling into a conversation, you listen to the people who are part of it and try and get a sense of what people are saying/thinking before you say anything.

I don’t think this is the best analogy for the internet age. (Also, too many people do exactly that, at parties, on the bus, and in classes.) I think a better analogy would be lurking around a popular blog for a while before commenting, and then trying to make your first comment be something useful, interesting, and on topic. Basically, historiography is so you don’t get admonished to LURK MOAR.

The problem with the stuff I’m doing is the historiography is a bit… problematic. I’ll put aside the issues of most disability history being related to how medical professionals and administrative folks viewed people with disabilities (don’t worry, I will write more on this, I assure you), since that’s really a main point of what we’re writing. However, what I do need to do is talk about the sorts of histories that institutions for people with disabilities would put out for themselves, with very specific goals in mind.

I’m currently looking at Journey to Independence, subtitled Blindness ~ The Canadian Story. It’s put out for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. It can easily be summed up as “CNIB! It is so awesome! Let me tell you all the awesome things that were done because of them! Before the CNIB, things were bad, but now they are Awesome! Look!!!” Which, you know, it’s a coffee table book put out by the CNIB. Of course that’s what it’s going to say. But I have to at least talk a bit about it. (The book isn’t bad if all you want is a shallow skim of the history of blindness in Canada that doesn’t go into any of the reasons many blind people reject the CNIB. It has a lot of stuff about Halifax, actually.)

The other book I’m looking at right now is called Reading Hands: The Halifax School for the Blind. This book starts with the “best” opening sentence ever: “The history of the blind was long one of sadness.” Then Christianity comes along and “It was quite natural therefore that the afflicted mortals congregated about the doors of the churches, where they could expect not only kindly treatment and understanding, but also often relief from physical pain and hunger.”

It pains me so.

There’s a word to describe these sorts of histories: meliorist. Things Were Bad! Then! Something Awesome Happened! Then! Things Were Better! I think this is how history tends to be taught, because it’s very Feel Good. It’s also very plodding and doesn’t reflect the nuances of history. Was the CNIB a good thing? I don’t know, but I do know a lot of blind people in Canada hate it. (I need to do more research to understand why, because I don’t actually know.) Was the Halifax School for the Blind made of awesome? I don’t know, but I do know they did a lot of things in an attempt to be “good” and seem to have been founded by actual blind people. (A step above the folks who ultimately founded the School for the Deaf, for what that’s worth. I’m really excited to learn more of the history of the school.)

Of course, writing something that’s basically “everything this group did is BAD BAD BAD” isn’t good history, either. I mean, it has a purpose, don’t get me wrong. But viewing all people who advocated for Oralism in the early 20th Century as bad ignores the nuances of their arguments, and also assumes everyone was doing it for the same reason. (Douglas Baynton, IIRC, argues that gender played a huge role in this – women who were teaching in the Deaf schools often advocated for Oralism because they thought it was very important to “have a voice in public”. I don’t think they did the right thing, and I think it had long-term horrible consequences for Deaf people, but it’s not as simple as “they were bad, and they should feel bad.” This isn’t to excuse abuse, neglect, eugenics, hatred, everything that was part of it all. I don’t think the intentions excuse anything. But they’re also important to know. Nuances.)

Baynton’s book Forbidden signs: American culture and the campaign against sign language has a limited preview available on Google Books, if you are interested in such things. I really enjoy his introduction, and he talks a bit about the scholarship he’s responding to there.

I have no doubt that I am going to write much more about this stuff, because I do enjoy looking at how the history of disability has developed the way it has. And also ranting about “awesome” book titles like Bender’s The conquest of deafness; a history of the long struggle to make possible normal living to those handicapped by lack of normal hearing.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.