Outrage in Ohio by David Kimmel

Author:David Kimmel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Tiffin, Ohio—June 23, 2017

David Kimmel

Just as the terms and categories for describing intellectual disability have changed over time, so too have the reactions of others to the disabled. In the mid-1900s, for example, people with intellectual disability were “out of the sight and out of mind of the general public,” and little attention was given to this group in popular culture or in scientific research.214 Schoolchildren of the period tended to reject or neglect their disabled peers socially, even more so when they interacted with them directly in the limited manner of their time.215 But such reactions are shaped by external factors, including the labels used to describe these individuals. Since the 1950s, deinstitutionalization, inclusion, and attention to such labels have been shown to change the attitudes of schoolchildren toward their peers with intellectual disabilities because these attitudes are not natural reactions to difference but rather social constructs.

Exactly how the people of rural western Ohio would have responded to someone with an intellectual disability in 1872 is difficult to pin down, since attitudes toward such individuals were changing dramatically during this period. Before systematic scientific efforts to understand and educate individuals with intellectual disabilities began in the early nineteenth century,216 public attitudes and understanding were conflicted. One strain of thought in the eighteenth century harkened back to the Middle Ages, when “idiocy” was often conflated with “dementia” and when disabilities were viewed as the sins of the parents being visited on their children217 as issues of character.218 The disabled, like the poor, were viewed as a normal and unchangeable aspect of social life.219 At the same time, though, most children with cognitive disabilities “blended into the community” and “for all practical purposes, were not mentally retarded” because at that time, the demands for reading, writing, and technical skills were lower than the norms for today.220 Children with intellectual disabilities were included in regular schools and, when grown, participated in the lives of their communities.221 Americans throughout the eighteenth century noted the differences in the intellectually disabled but did not fear them.222

Ironically, by the mid-nineteenth century, these older attitudes were changing for the worse due to the work of the very people trying to help the “feebleminded.” In the early 1800s, families held the primary responsibility of caring for the intellectually disabled; when that system failed, the community as a whole had to step in, often in the guise of the new institution of almshouses.223 Particularly in the urbanizing East, almshouses increasingly became the destination for the intellectually disabled, and by the middle of the century, reformers were documenting the horrid conditions and even physical abuse prevalent in such facilities.224 Reformers such as J. G. Whittier and Dorothea Lynde Dix reported not only on the failures of the almshouses but also on the deplorable living conditions of children with intellectual disabilities found living with impoverished and neglectful families.225 Because these reformers were also attempting to justify the establishment and funding of the new asylums and schools for such children, painting the

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