A brief history of ableism in the United States

Ableism is a concept foreign to many and is not discussed in your standard history course. This article will explore some ableist events throughout the history of the United States. 

In order to fully comprehend the history of ableism, we must know what it is—according to Britannica, ableism is a “type of discrimination in which able-bodied individuals are viewed as normal and superior to those with a disability.” These actions can be as large of an event as the Euthanasia Program run by the Nazis, or as small as simply asking someone what is “wrong” with them. 

Looking back to as early as the 1500s, we can already see ableist acts in American society; in this era, people with mental illnesses or even epilepsy were thought to be possessed by evil spirits and were whipped and burned at the stake regularly, according to the National Conference of Community and Justice (NCCJ). This is one of the earliest recordings of ableism and indicated a belief that stuck around for many centuries. 

Moving forward in history, we see the implementation of the Eugenics Movement in 1850. For those who are unfamiliar, the Eugenics Movement was a movement that aimed to purify the human gene pool. In 1883, the United States adopted this movement and started to implement its practices, some of which included creating laws that prevented people with disabilities from moving to the U.S., the institutionalization of many people with disabilities, and forced sterilization. 

According to the Indiana Eugenics Education website, in 1907, the state of Indiana passed legislation allowing the involuntary sterilization of “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” The terms “idiots” and “imbeciles” were used at the time to refer to people with a form of disability. Regardless of the cognitive function of an individual, these people were sterilized, meaning a medical procedure was performed to prevent the patient from having children, non-consensually. In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization laws were not a violation of civil rights for people with disabilities. The law passed by Indiana is believed to be one of the first eugenics laws passed in the world, and by 1938, thirty-two other states followed suit and passed laws similar to this one. All sterilization laws were repealed in the state of Indiana in 1974, according to the Indiana Historical Bureau, and a formal apology was then issued.

Amidst these laws, a poll regarding sterilization and eugenics was sent out to Americans in 1937. The results of this poll showed that 45% of Americans were in favor of euthanizing “defective” infants, according to the NCCJ; in other words, 45% of Americans were in favor of killing babies just because they had some form of disability.

In the 1960s, change began to occur for people in the disabled community as the Disability Rights Movement started to take shape. One of the initiatives born from this movement was the Independent Living Movement which helped provide people with disabilities a place to live within the community. The event that spurred the movement was when Ed Roberts, a polio survivor and college student at the University of California at Berkeley, created the first Center for Independent Living.

Roberts created this center because he was a college student living in the hospital. He was unable to make many of the decisions we take for granted today and had to be back at the hospital by 10 p.m. every night. As anyone would, Roberts grew tired of his restrictions, and with the help of federal funding, opened the center in the early 1970s. The actions of Roberts brought this issue to light and in 1978, the federal Rehabilitation Act was amended to provide federal funding to create a network of independent living centers across the country. This Rehabilitation Act as a whole aimed to integrate people with disabilities back into the community after years of being institutionalized and separated from society by providing legal backing to prohibit discrimination against these individuals.

As our society has developed, laws have been created to ensure equal access for people with disabilities. In Jul. of 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed by President George H.W. Bush. According to the ADA, this set of laws “prohibits discrimination and guarantees that people with disabilities have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in the mainstream of American life.”

It took American society as a whole until 1990 to comprehend the concept of disability, and even now there is a lack of understanding. By looking back through the abundant history of ableism in our society, we can prevent things like this from happening again in the future. There is far more history than what has been put in this article, so I urge you to explore this topic more and deepen your understanding of ableism’s past.