Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 1850-1979

Abstract

Childhood not only occupies its own chronological space in the lives of individuals, but also is a period of nebulous legal, familial, medical, and educational status. In Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 1850–1979, editors Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale have compiled an impressive array of essays analyzing the experiences of disabled children in Western nations that span a nearly one-hundred-and-thirty-year period. Including a wide variety of national contexts, types of disabilities, and familial capacities, these essays reveal that the daily lives of disabled children varied tremendously. Who cared for them, with what authority and rationale, where, and what caretaking meant, reflected and was part of larger national and regional histories. How children responded to, contested, and demanded care, mattered. One significant thread and analytical query connecting these essays is that of the consequences of the development of compulsory education—consequences intended and unintended, implicit and explicit. Compulsory education involved the increased integration of medical and educational experts, often with significant power and authority, into the daily lives of children and families. For some families, this meant the removal of children from the parental home on either a short-term or long-term basis. For some parents, this meant intensified scrutiny and assessment of their parental abilities. However welcome or unwelcome, insertion of the state and state powers into familial households changed the lives of children with disabilities dramatically. Increased surveillance altered lives. As the editors note in their introduction, “hand-in-hand with an impulse to care often went a desire to control” (3).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.