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Thursday, February 09, 2006

Why disability studies entails the study of everything else, part two

Welcome to the second (and final) installment of Douglas Baynton Should be Mandatory Reading for Everyone Working on the History of U.S. Citizenship Week!  Yeah, I know, it’s an unwieldy title.  That’s why we’re only doing two installments.

Here’s Doug on disability and gender:

Paralleling the arguments made in defense of slavery, two types of disability argument were used in opposition to women’s suffrage: that women had disabilities that made them incapable of using the franchise responsibly, and that because of their frailty women would become disabled if exposed to the rigors of political participation.  The American anti-suffragist Grace Goodwin, for example, pointed to the “great temperamental disabilities” with which women had to contend: “woman lacks endurance in things mental. . . .  She lacks nervous stability.  The suffragists who dismay England are nerve-sick women.” The second line of argument, which was not incompatible with the first and often accompanied it, went beyond the claim that women’s flaws made them incapable of exercising equal political and social rights with men to warn that if women were given those rights, disability would surely follow.  This argument is most closely identified with Edward Clarke, author of Sex in Education; or, a Fair Chance for Girls.  Clarke’s argument chiefly concerned education for women, though it was often applied to suffrage as well.  Clarke maintained that overuse of the brain among young women was in large part responsible for the “numberless pale, weak, neuralgic, dyspeptic, hysterical, menorraghic, dysmenorrhoeic girls and women” of America.  The result of excessive education in this country was “bloodless female faces, that suggest consumption, scrofula, anemia, and neuralgia.” An appropriate education designed for their frail constitutions would ensure “a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements from the nervous system.” (41-42)

Scrofula!  Uterine disease!  Who knew?  Clearly education and suffrage were deleterious to women’s health.  Whereas corsets, say, were hazard-free.

But here’s the rub: at the time, most women (and advocates of women’s rights) made their case for citizenship precisely by distinguishing themselves from segments of the population that were properly considered diseased and disabled.  That’s the way the logic of abjection works, folks!  Just as dangerous professor Michael Warner argues, in another context, in The Trouble with Normal.

Back to Baynton:

A second powerful and recurrent rhetorical device for suffragists was to charge that women were wrongly categorized with those legitimately excluded from political life.  A popular theme in both British and American suffrage posters was to depict a thoughtful-looking woman, perhaps wearing the gown of a college graduate, surrounded by slope-browed, wild-eyed, or “degenerate” men identified implicitly or explicitly as “idiots” and “lunatics.” The caption might read, “Women and her Political Peers,” or, “It’s time I got out of this place.  Where shall I find the key?” Echoing this theme, suffrage supporter George William Curtis rhetorically asked a New York constitutional convention in 1867 why women should be classed with “idiots, lunatics, persons under guardianship and felons,” and at the national Woman Suffrage Convention in 1869, Elizabeth Cady Stanton protested that women were “thrust outside the pale of political consideration with minors, paupers, lunatics, traitors, [and] idiots.” (44)

Is this stuff still relevant today?  You bet:

While historians have not overlooked the use of disability to deny women’s rights, they have given their attention entirely to gender inequality and not at all to the construction and maintenance of cultural hierarchies based on disability. . . . [J]ust as it was left unchallenged at the time, historians today leave unchallenged the notion that weakness, nervousness, or proneness to fainting might legitimately disqualify one for suffrage. (43)

And that’s not to mention (to pick up from yesterday’s installment) racist cranks like Dinesh D’Souza, who wrote in The End of Racism that the civil rights movement failed because it did not consider its likely consequences, namely, that “racism might be fortified if blacks were unable to exercise their rights effectively and responsibly” (169).  Of course, we’re far more enlightened than the benighted creatures of the nineteenth century.  No one today would think of allowing racist cranks like D’Souza anywhere near national media, and no one would dream of arguing that “frailty” was a legitimate ground for excluding women from some aspects of public life.

Speaking of cranks!  It’s time for a . . .

David Horowitz Update: Yes, I’ve seen his latest.  I’ll have my reply tomorrow.  And don’t forget to set your TiVo for Hannity and Colmes next week—David is their guest every single night!  Five full hours of Horowitz!  Let’s hope he doesn’t say anything stupid or untrue.  Because, you know, that would be unfortunate.

Posted by Michael on 02/09 at 11:09 AM
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