Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T21:14:04.461Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Slaves, Immigrants, and Suffragists: The Uses of Disability in Citizenship Debates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Douglas Baynton*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa

Extract

In an article published nearly two de-cades ago, Joan Scott discussed the difficulty of persuading historians to take gender seriously. A common response to women's history was that “women had a history separate from men's, therefore let feminists do women's history, which need not concern us,” or “my understanding of the French Revolution is not changed by knowing that women participated in it.” Despite the substantial number of works on women's history, the topic remained marginal in the discipline. Simply adding women to history, Scott argued, while necessary and important, would not be sufficient to change the paradigms of the profession. To accomplish that, feminists had to demonstrate that gender was “a constitutive element of social relationships” and “a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (1055, 1067).

Type
Conference on Disability Studies and the University
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Act to Regulate Immigration. 3 Aug. 1882. Stat. 22.214.Google Scholar
Calhoun, John C. “Mr. Calhoun to Mr. Pakenham.” 18 Apr. 1844. The Works of John C. Calhoun. Ed. Richard K. Cralle. Vol. 5. New York: Appleton, 1888. 333–39.Google Scholar
Camhi, Jane Jerome. Women against Women: American Anti-suffragism, 1880-1920. New York: Carlson, 1994.Google Scholar
Cartwright, Samuel A.Report on the Disease and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race.” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 7 (1851): 691715.Google Scholar
Clarke, Edward. Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls. 1873. New York: Arno, 1972.Google Scholar
Digby, Anne. “Woman's Biological Straitjacket.” Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Susan Mendas and Jane Randall. New York: Routledge, 1989.Google Scholar
Forry, Samuel. “On the Relative Proportion of Centenarians, of Deaf and Dumb, of Blind, and of Insane in the Races of European and African Origin.” New York Journal of Medicine and the Collateral Sciences 2 (1844): 310–20.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Grace Duffield. Anti-suffrage: Ten Good Reasons. New York: Duffield, 1913.Google Scholar
Grayson, Thomas Wray. “The Effect of the Modern Immigrant on Our Industrial Centers.” Medical Problems of Immigration. Easton: Amer. Acad. of Medicine, 1913. 103–10.Google Scholar
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 1955.Google Scholar
Immigration Act. 3 Mar. 1891. Stat. 26.1084.Google Scholar
Immigration Act. 20 Feb. 1907. Stat. 34.899.Google Scholar
Kraditor, Aileen S. The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement. New York: Norton, 1981.Google Scholar
Magner, Lois. “Darwinism and the Woman Question: The Evolving Views of Charlotte Perkins Oilman.” Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ed. Joanne Karpinski. New York: Hall, 1992. 115–28.Google Scholar
Miller, J. F.The Effects of Emancipation upon the Mental and Physical Health of the Negro of the South.” North Carolina Medical Journal 38 (1896): 285–94.Google Scholar
Potter, William Warren. “How Should Oirls Be Educated? A Public Health Problem for Mothers, Educators, and Physicians.” Transactions of the Medical Society of the State of New York. Albany: Medical Soc. of the State of New York, 1891. 4256.Google Scholar
Ross, Edward Alsworth. The Old World and the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People. New York: Century, 1914.Google Scholar
Sanders, Leon. Letter to Surgeon Oeneral of the Public Health and Marine Hospital. 14 Nov. 1909. National Archives, Washington. RO 90, entry 10, file 219.Google Scholar
Scott, Daryl Michael. Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Soul, 1880-1996. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.10.5149/uncp/9780807846353CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Joan. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053–75.10.2307/1864376CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sheppard, Alice. Cartooning for Suffrage. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1994.Google Scholar
Smith, A. Lapthorn. “Higher Education of Women and Race Suicide.” Popular Science Monthly Mar. 1905. Rpt. in Men's Ideas / Women's Realities: Popular Science, 1870-1915. Ed. Louise Michele Newman. New York: Pergamon, 1985. 147–51.Google Scholar
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. “Address to the National Woman Convention, Washington, D.C., January 19, 1869.” The Concise History of Woman Suffrage. Ed. Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1978. 249–56.Google Scholar
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, Anthony, Susan B., and Matilda Joslyn Oage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 2. 1881. New York: Arno, 1969.Google Scholar
Szasz, Thomas S.The Sane Slave: A Historical Note on the Use of Medical Diagnosis as Justificatory Rhetoric.” American Journal of Psychotherapy 25 (1971): 228–39.10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.1971.25.2.228CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tickner, Lisa. The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-14. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.Google Scholar
Trent, James W. Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.Google Scholar
United States. Bureau of Immigration. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Immigration. Washington: OPO, 1907.Google Scholar
United States. Public Health Service. Regulations Governing the Medical Inspection of Aliens. Washington: OPO, 1917.Google Scholar
Van Evrie, John H. White Supremacy and Negro Subordination, or Negroes a Subordinate Race. New York: Van Evrie, 1868.Google Scholar
Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience: Volume One: To 1920. New York: McOraw, 1994.Google Scholar
Woman's Rights Conventions: Seneca Falls and Rochester, 1848. 1870. New York: Arno, 1969.Google Scholar