During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans
with all sorts of disabilities came to be labeled as "unproductive
citizens." Before that, disabled people had contributed as they
were able in homes, on farms, and in the wage labor market,
reflecting the fact that Americans had long viewed productivity as
a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability. But as Sarah F.
Rose explains in
No Right to Be Idle, a perfect storm of
public policies, shifting family structures, and economic changes
effectively barred workers with disabilities from mainstream
workplaces and simultaneously cast disabled people as morally
questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation to
achieve "self-care" and "self-support."
By tracing the experiences of policymakers, employers, reformers,
and disabled people caught up in this epochal transition, Rose
masterfully integrates disability history and labor history. She
shows how people with disabilities lost access to paid work and the
status of "worker--a shift that relegated them and their families
to poverty and second-class economic and social citizenship. This
has vast consequences for debates about disability, work, poverty,
and welfare in the century to come.