Disability and the justification of inequality

1. “Disability [is] marker of hierarchical relations.” (34) • “Disability has functioned to justify inequality for disabled people themselves, but it has also done so for women and minority groups.” (33) • Baynton cites three examples: • Women’s suffrage • African American freedom and civil rights • Restriction of immigrants (33) Disability and the justification of inequality

2. Images of American blacks have commonly shown them with exaggerated lips, amusingly long or bowed legs, grotesquely big feet, bad posture, missing teeth, crossed or bulging eyes, and otherwise deformed bodies.” (40) Constructing Race and disability

3. Anti-suffragists argued that women were mentally deficient and thus not equal to the responsibilities of full citizenship • frail, irrational, and given to emotional excesses • “like racial and ethnic minorities, women were said to be less evolved than white men, their disabilities the result of lesser evolutionary development.” (41) Constructing gender and disability

4. 1882 Immigration Law “prohibited entry to any ‘lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.’” (45) In 1907, “imbeciles” and “feeble-minded persons” were added to the list of excluded groups (46) Constructing immigrants as disabled

5. The charge that certain ethnic groups were mentally and physically deficient was instrumental in arguing for their exclusion. (47) • The “slow-witted Slav” • The “neurotic condition of our Jewish immigrants” • The “degenerate and psychopathic types, which are so conspicuous and numerous amonf rhe immigrants.” (47)

6. “If you had gone over to Ellis Island shortly before the war began and placed your hand at random on one of the aliens waiting to be examined by government inspectors, you would very likely have found that your choice was feebleminded.” “The standard would seem to be too low for prospective American citizens.” -- Goddard “Two Immigrants Out Of Five Feebleminded”

8. “no one can stand at Ellis Island and see the physical and mental wrecks who are stopped there . . . without becoming a firm believer in restriction.” (48) • “South Europeans run to low stature, A gang of Italian navvies filing along the street present, by their dwarfishness, a curious contrast to other people. The Portuguese, the Greeks, and the Syrians are, from our point of view, undersized. The Hebrew immigrants are very poor in physique . . . the polar opposite of our pioneer breed.” (48) Impairment of appearance-- --impairment of function

9. We want ugly women in America and we are getting them in millions… [T]hree or four shiploads have been landing at Ellis Island every week…. Examine these women as they are unloaded at Ellis Island. I have studied thousands of them…. They are broad-hipped, short, stout-legged with big feet; broad-backed, flat-chested with necks like a prize-fighter and with faces expressionless and devoid of beauty. -Albert Wiggam, Fruit of the Family Tree (1924) Wiggam contrasts such “draft horses: and “the beautiful women of the old American stocks, the Daughter s of the American Revolution.” Quoted in Martin Pernick, The Black Stork (1996), 64. Eugenics and racialized notions of beauty

11. Normal “functioned as an ideal” and was “implicitly defined as that which advanced progress.” (36) • Defective was the opposite of normal. It was “below average” and it “pulled humanity back toward its animal origins.” (36) • At the 1904 World’s Fair, displays of “defectives” alongside “primitives” signaled similar and interconnected classification schemes for both defective people and defective races.” (36) Evolutionary theory and the concept of normality

15. “a causative factor in the production of crime, prostitution, pauperism, illegitimacy, intemperance and other complex social diseases.” “The hereditary cases [of feeblemindedness] are the most numerous.” Even in “accidental or environmental” cases, “The real origin of the disease lies in the defect of the germ plasm.” “The burden of feeble-mindedness”

16. “[T]he daughter went to the almshouse. Let no one suppose that this was tragic for her. Suffering comes only with intelligence, a sense of shame only with the power to grasp an ideal, and to realize that we have fallen below it. In her case, both conditions were wanting.” “The young woman was perfectly honest, strong, willing, and trainable in household affairs.” “unto the third generation”

17. Disability and eugenicsin early 20th-century Film

19. Advertisement for the The Black Stork in the Chicago Herald Tribune, April 1, 1917

21. The Black Stork – Examining the Baby

22. The Black Stork - Haiselden with a patient , 1917

23. Still from The Black Stork -Vision of childhood rejection, 1917

24. Still from The Black Stork - Claude and Anne's baby - closeup

26. In successful social species the functions of the individual must be subordinated to the best interest of the race. If surgical interference in a case will be to the detriment of society, such interference would be antisocial. If the progress of surgery is to be used to the detriment of the race... it may conceivably destroy the race. Charles B. Davenport,Director of the Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution and of the Eugenics Records Office. Handicapped from birth to death, what but pain, shame, humiliation and distress awaits them. Edward Berwick.