Book Review

Methods/Theory

Historians treat disability "merely as personal tragedy or an insult to be deplored . . . rather than a cultural construct to be questioned and explored," Douglas Baynton charges in this collection of essays (p. 52). By contrast, Brad Byrom and K. Walter Hickel show that for over 100 years, public policy makers and disabled Americans have known that social and medical conceptions of disability coexist and are contested. Overall the contributors challenge the broad sweep of Baynton's indictment. After decades of disability activism, this superb volume shows, some historians recognize that culture and social context define disability and interpret its meaning. Editors Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky want more, however. They seek to convince historians that disability belongs with race, class, and gender as a "standard analytical tool" of historical analysis (p. 15). This task is not easy, but their effort has uncovered some very good history, including one article—Baynton's—that suggests how and why historians might need to grant disability interpretive power.	1
Most of the essays address specific issues rather than attempting a theoretical justification for placing disability at the core of historical study. Nearly half focus on people with a particular disability and demonstrate the intersection of their lives with larger themes in American history. In a beautifully written narrative, for instance, Hannah Joyner chronicles the struggle of deaf North Carolinian David Tillinghast to break free from his family's stifling definition of a southerner and from social constructions of disability as dependency. The social chaos of the Civil War offered Tillinghast this opportunity, and he used it to maximum advantage. In defiance of his family, he spent the war at the New York School for the Deaf, becoming a teacher and marrying a deaf woman. He returned to his native North Carolina after the war, "a proud and independent man commanding the respect of his family" (p. 102).	2
While Tillinghast's story is a straightforward account of a deaf man realizing his potential at a critical period in our past, Catherine Kudlick looks at two periodicals concerned with blindness to show the complexity of disability issues in historical analysis and their frequent intertwining with gender issues. She writes that blindness, and disability generally, "undermined the rigid [gender] roles [of] Victorian culture" (p. 191). Disabled women were considered unfit to marry and have children, pushing them into the work force, but disability often moved men out of the work force and into a dependent—feminine—cultural role. "Blindness undermined manhood and redefined womanhood in unsettling ways," Kudlick argues.	3
Kudlick also discusses some of the complexities disabled Americans confront. One is the paradox created by the culture's reification of individual achievement. Disabled people claim a right to independence and autonomy, but they often need assistance from public policy makers and philanthropists to assure that they are not discriminated against and that society adjusts to their needs. As she writes, "if blind people came off [in their publications] as competent and self sufficient, why give the organizations helping them money?" Kudlick shows, too, that the meaning of cultural roles for disabled and nondisabled people have not necessarily been the same. Writing about the Progressive era, she argues that "championing marriage and child-rearing for blind women was a radical act in terms of disability," but it was a conservative act in terms of womanhood (pp. 206–207).	. . .