Abstract
This paper explores historical ableism in the United States workforce from the close of the Civil War to the end of World War II. It discusses the issues people with disabilities (PWD), including disabled veterans, faced when entering or returning to the workforce, along with the policy and practical shifts that occurred to mitigate such issues. We approach this discussion with a critical and intersectional lens, situating the shift within critical disability studies and framing analyses within historically relevant medical, economic, and social modes of disability. We aim to inform Human Resource Development (HRD) scholars, practitioners, and educators about PWD’s often underrepresented histories in various workplaces and training programs by demonstrating the impacts of the models and workplace ableism. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the legacies of historical policies and practices continue to shape professional and continuing education for many PWD.
Negative attitudes toward people with disabilities (PWD) permeate all aspects of society, with examples including high rates of unemployment and incarceration experienced by PWD, so-called “concerned citizens” confronting people they assume to be able-bodied parking in reserved spots, and casual jokes about mental illness. The exclusion and stereotyping of members of the disability community is a form of discrimination known as ableism (Friedman & Owen, 2017). The effects of ableism can be especially challenging in the workplace for employees with disabilities (Kulkarni & Lengnick-Hall, 2014). Ableism, not disability, deprives individuals of dignity, income, and independence. It can manifest as unfair treatment, denied opportunities for career growth, and other forms of workplace discrimination that can stymie the careers of those subjected to it.
Purpose and Significance
Professional development and workforce education are core aspects of Human Resource Development (HRD), and PWD are an important, yet under-researched and underserved, population. Previous history of HRD research has largely overlooked issues of disability, with exceptions (Bohonos et al., in press) focusing on the history of late 20th-century legislation relative to disability in the workplace. Recent literature focused on disability in AHRD (Academy of Human Resource Development) journals has looked at confronting ableism (Kwon, 2021, 2023) disability and leadership (Procknow et al., 2017), HRD models (Thoms & Burton, 2018), and interventions (Farkas et al., 2020) for people with disability, as well as job preferences of PWD (Michna et al., 2017). While it is encouraging to see the growth of disability centered research in HRD, the topic has yet to be the focus of historical research in HRD. Histories of HRD have tended to focus on institutional aspects of HRD in the United States (Torraco, 2016; Watkins & McLean, 2016), United Kingdom (Steward & Sambrook, 2012), and China (Wang et al., 2021), while other studies have taken a comparative international approach (Alagaraia & Dooley, 2003; Kuchinke, 2009) and begun to take critical race approaches (Bohonos & James-Gallaway, 2022). Yet, none of these studies have foregrounded disability in their analysis. This paper will begin the process of filling an important gap in both the history of HRD and the disability in HRD literature by foregrounding the history of disability in HRD.
The purpose of this conceptual historical study of secondary historical literature is to critically evaluate the history of disability in the United States during the period of 1880–1955, taking into consideration other minoritized and marginalized groups, and present its implications for contemporary HRD. In doing so we aim to expand the current understanding of HRD history by placing ableism in a more robust historical context that emphasizes earlier histories of disability in the workplace, specifically addressing disability history from the close of the Civil War, during which the number of soldiers with physical disabilities due to the war surged (Nielsen, 2012), and to the return home of disabled veterans of World War II, which also served as a tipping point for the modern civil rights movement (National WWII Museum, 2023a). We choose to focus on this time period to highlight the rapid growth of ableism that took place during this time and demonstrate how the economic, medical, and social conditions of the time allowed it to take root and persist for multiple generations. Studying disability history from this period helps to clarify how the current state of ableist attitudes towards PWD remain undergirded by themes of profitability, productivity, and racism, and are deeply related to a disabled person’s position in the workforce and society. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the legacies of historical policies and practice continue to shape workplace realities for many PWD and suggestions for paths forward for HRD practitioners and researchers.
Theories and Models for Disability Research
DisCrit, a variation of Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory coined by Annamma et al. (2013), demonstrates that other identity markers such as race and gender often eclipse one’s sense of identity as it relates to their disability. It emphasizes the need for individuals with disabilities to acknowledge and accept their whole selves, including their disabilities. It is common for non-marginalized populations to implicitly or explicitly pressure such people to set aside or even mask aspects of their identity to be taken seriously or receive more equitable treatment from others (Mueller, 2021).
Compartmentalizing one’s identity in this way reinforces the stigma of disability and prevents PWD from developing a complete sense of their intrinsic value. Like race, the definition of disability has fluctuated throughout history, often intentionally to maintain systemic inequalities in response to societal changes (Annamma et al., 2013). For these reasons, it is essential to develop an historically informed view of disability that critically examines those historical sources of identity formation and places disability history in conversation with histories relative to race, gender, class, nationality, sexual orientation, and other social identity markers. To develop such a view, scholars must understand the various models of disability that attempt to speak to the roles of PWD in society and define how they should be viewed by those without disabilities. There is an extensive and evolving list of disability models borne from different environments, cultures, movements, and eras (Disabled World, 2023). With a perspective focused on inequity, discrimination, and shared experiences of disability injustice, we evaluated the events that took place as the popularity and prominence of the medical, economic, and social models ebbed and flowed within society. Within this historical context, we demonstrate how the attitudes and behaviors of certain time periods were reflections of one of these predominant models. As depicted by the arrows accompanying each model in Figure 1, these models do not definitively bookend eras, with first the medical model (later widely rejected by disability advocates) and the economic model competing for prominence in the earlier 1900s and followed by the social model rising in popularity within disability advocacy communities. Selected models of disability throughout history.
While the medical model that was popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries treats PWD as incomplete and in need of correction, the economic model that gained traction during World War II shifted focus to putting PWDs to work in inequitable ways defined by disability and limited accessibility, opportunity, and creativity. The social model of disability represents a more contemporary view of PWD informed by the activism of the Civil Rights era. This model serves as a lens for future implications for HRD because it views disability as a social construct and turns the focus outward to attitudes, policies, and environments instead of diagnoses (Berger & Wilbers, 2020).
Disability-Centered Historical Methodology
Inspired by race-centered historical methodology (RCHM) (James-Gallaway & Randolph, 2021), which is a methodological approach to history (and historiography) developed within the tradition of critical race theory (CRT) and represents “a critical approach to history that centers race and racism alongside other categories of intersectional identity” (pp. 333–334), the present study seeks to advance a related concept we are calling disability centered historical methodology. Recent works of RCHM (Bohonos et al., 2023; Bohonos & James-Gallaway, 2022) have engaged with detailed readings of influential texts of Black history to identify insights that could be imported to Adult Education and HRD and be used to craft more nuanced historical narratives relative to race that challenge the White-dominated standing historical narratives in each field. In a conceptually comparable manner, this paper used a disability-centered historical methodology to place the field of HRD into dialogue with core concepts from disability history in the United States by focusing on disability-centered texts to integrate into a field that has historically involve non-disabled theories, research, and practices. We began by handsearching the abstracts and titles of the four AHRD sponsored journals for articles containing the words “disability” or disabilities” or “disabled” or “ableism.” The search resulted in 16 articles, none of which took a historical approach. We also consulted our research notes from a previous project (Bohonos et al., 2023) which reviewed ten years of historical literature in Adult Education and HRD journals and confirmed that U.S. disability history was not a primary focus of any of the over 40 papers identified in that search. Thus, we determined that a systematic review of literature relative to the history of disability in HRD was impractical because the topic remains underexplored in HRD research. At this point we determined our best approach was to consult titles, tables of contents, and other publisher provided materials for a variety of books focused on the history of disability in the United States and to evaluate these materials to determine which books would contain information with high relevance to HRD. For this reason, we excluded history books that focused on children with disabilities, history of K-12 education, and books focusing on adults in non-work contexts. We emphasized the inclusion of disability histories that had strong ties to organizational, institutional, workplace, and economic issues. After deciding on books to include, the researchers read full texts and marked sections with relevance to HRD for deeper analysis, revisiting them as we developed the themes to present in this study.
We combine these themes with a discussion of contemporary disability literature to form a historically focused conceptual paper around disability and HRD. Conceptual historical papers are important to the field of history (Evans, 2012) and are especially important to applied fields, including business, adult education and HRD, when they have long overlooked historical scholarship that connects the field to a particular marginalized group (Bohonos & James-Gallaway, 2022; Cooke, 2003). This conceptual historical article grounded in secondary historical literature is a key step to help HRD begin to grapple with the history of disability in the workplace and its consequences for PWD.
Findings
In tracing the provenance of what we now see as ableism in the workplace, our research identified key themes of personhood and profitability that recur throughout the time period in question. A major shift in the ways in which the United States marginalized PWD transpired between the 1880s and the early 1900s, as the nation moved from an agricultural to an industrial economy (Nielsen, 2012). America’s particular mode of capitalism has exerted an enormously powerful influence around the globe. This achievement required a productive workforce – one that could serve to increase profits without increasing spending. Industrial capitalists placed value on those they perceived as able to contribute as laborers and, under the guise of philanthropy, used the capital they amassed to support policies and practices aimed at eliminating people who did not fit their version of a productive society. These practices disproportionally harmed PWD as well as people of color (POC) and poor Whites.
We can see unambiguous evidence of PWD’s role in the American workforce changing and broader society growing increasingly fixated on PWD’s economic value over time. We began our discussion in the late 1800s when the medical model took hold due to Civil War soldiers returning home with disabilities that could affect their ability to maintain their livelihoods. This perspective treated the prostheses and early forms of accommodations that allowed them to get back to work as medical interventions that eliminated the problem of disability. Following that thread into the early 1900s, when the medical model became increasingly popular as scientific and medical advancements led people to believe curative interventions could eradicate disability (Shakespeare, 2006). While this model began based on the perception of disability – what people could see as disabled – it became entwined with eugenics when the movement identified that certain disabilities were genetically-based (Carey, 2003). As the economy of the United States shifted to more industrial and less agrarian production, a person’s ability to contribute to industry became a marker of their status in society. During this time, many saw disability as another moral evil to solve by societal interventions. Finally, we see how the desire to “rehabilitate” PWD in the mid-1900s commodified and stratified PWD based on their ability to generate revenue for employers, which established patterns of injustice that continue to inform the contemporary workplace practice and policies to which PWD are subjected.
1880s–1920s: The “Progressive” Era
Often referred to by historians as the “Progressive” Era because of the government’s intense focus on reforms intended to advance the moral character of the nation, this period saw reform efforts flourish (Nielsen, 2012). The temperance movement secured passage of the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol, and the women’s suffrage movement gained voting rights for White women through passage of the 19th Amendment. Other reform efforts focused on opposing lynching and other forms of racist violence and resulted in the formation of powerful civil rights organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). While it is easy for contemporary readers to see how historical actors viewed efforts like women’s suffrage and anti-lynching as progressive, other causes endorsed by “progressives” from this era would be considered ethically problematic if not morally repugnant by most contemporary progressives.
Eugenics Movement and the Medical Model
One example of a morally repugnant reform effort taken up in the Progressive Era with salience for people with disabilities, as well as anyone who traces their lineage to any geographical area outside of Western or Northern Europe, is the eugenics movement (Nielsen, 2012). Eugenics was a social and scientific movement that sought to build a better human race by shaping human breeding practices in ways that would emphasize traits deemed socially desirable by economic elites who hailed from western or northern Europe, while eliminating traits elites deemed socially undesirable – traits like poverty, disability, homosexuality, and dark skin, eyes, or hair (Turda, 2014). Since leaders of the eugenics movements associated undesirable traits with people of African, Asian, Eastern/Central European, and Jewish descent, the movement sought to control the breeding and limit the immigration of these groups (Klausen & Bashford, 2012). The eugenics movement reinforced discriminatory views that PWD were burdens in their current state and must be altered, improved, or in the worst of cases, eliminated, for them to be accepted by society (Catte, 2021; Cohen, 2017). While eugenics did not focus specifically on individual cures like the medical model, it shared a systematic, macro intent with that model in focusing on the diagnostic and genetic elements of disability in search of a way to “cure” humanity of disability. It blamed genetics for a wide range of undesirable traits including “insanity, idiocy, imbecility... deafness, blindness, deaf-mutism and color blindness” (Gallagher, 1995, p. 50) and therefore empowered the scientific and medical communities to pursue methods of removing certain genes from the population. Eugenicists of this time generally approached it from one of two perspectives – “positive eugenics” and “negative eugenics” – that each had differing tactics. To be clear the authors take issue with each approach and in no way want to imply that positive eugenics was a morally good or just approach. Positive eugenics refers to efforts to encourage breeding for desirable traits (Wilkinson, 2010). In the Progressive Era, eugenicists offered their services to evaluate potential marriage partners to determine the “genetic potential” of the couple’s possible offspring. Negative eugenics refers to efforts to limit the transmission of genetic traits considered undesirable (Wilkinson, 2010).
The negative eugenics movement and subsequent laws that rose to prominence in the early 20th century contributed mightily to the development of both ableism and the furthering of the medical model of disability (Whitaker, 2001). Eugenics was directly associated with science and institutions of higher learning. For example, Progressive Era eugenicists drew on the work of Darwin and the emerging science of genetics to develop elaborate theories of human heredity that were endorsed by many of the most highly regarded scientific and academic minds of the era (Booth, 2021). Eugenics was considered a credible scientific discipline with its own research journals, significant grant funding from leading foundations, and, by 1914, at least forty-four colleges and universities across the United States offering courses on eugenics (Whitaker, 2001). Courses on eugenics were understood as a key content knowledge area for professions charged with pursuing the public good including social workers, politicians, scientists, and physicians (Cohen, 2017). Thus, eugenics has clear ties to the medical model of disability. Over time disability has come to be broadly viewed by society as a negative defining characteristic – a medical problem that needs to be solved – rather than a simple difference for everyone to navigate (Kwon & Archer, 2022).
The medical model of disability describes PWD as suffering from inborn genetic traits, and in the eyes of eugenicists this rendered cultural and educational approaches to treatment naive and counterproductive and implies that PWD are somehow responsible for their “condition” and thus are also responsible for shielding society from it. According to this model, disabled people are “deficient and inherently inferior to non-disabled people, and thus it is they, not society, who are most in need of change” (Berger & Wilbers, 2020, p. 23). The conflation of moral decay with physical embodiments like disability, while gravely misplaced, was common across the world as the global medical community grappled with identifying the sources and causes of contagions. Disability was assumed to be caused by promiscuity or other immoral behavior and served as a lesson to others to avoid the same fate; for example, in 1899 the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla created a depiction of a group of children with polio in ¡Triste herencia! (Sad Inheritance!). However, audiences and critics did not see the depiction of polio, but instead registered the imagery as congenital syphilis, objectifying the children in the painting as being consequences of and perhaps punishment for the imagined social sins of their parents (Klass, 2024).
Additionally, the eugenics movement found strength in non-scientific communities that feared disability. These communities included Christian faith communities who taught that disability was a punishment for sin and shameful evidence of divine punishment (Olkin, 2022), and white supremacists who recognized the political utility of couching racist policies and practices in the language of science. Eugenics offered the promise of a race without disability and, therefore, without shame. Eugenicists used techniques considered scientific, including intelligence testing, referrals from physicians and other metal health providers, as well as genetic profiles based on family histories, to identify people who should be considered unfit to procreate because they would supposedly give birth to children who would then become so-called burdens on society (Franks, 2005), with poor White women and women of color being disproportionately affected (Catte, 2021; Roberts, 2007).
Forced Sterilization
Many individuals, labeled as “feeble-minded” at the time, were victims of the belief that disability could be bred out of humanity (Hyatt, 1998). Eugenic beliefs and policies enacted reproductive oppression through the confinement of women to sex-segregated institutions as well as medical procedures to forcibly sterilize women (McConnell & Phelan, 2022). The eugenic point of view cast the forced sterilization of unfit women as the means to building a better society, but also served to benefit the upper levels of society while having negative effects on its victims. Sterilization caused women who would otherwise be busy raising their own children to be available to serve as productive domestic workers. Eliminating the possibility of children meant they needed less time away from caring for their employers’ families. Sterilization and their subservient position in the workforce made these women particularly susceptible to sexual assault (Catte, 2021). Thus, on multiple levels women were targeted for forced sterilization by men who sought to make them more easily exploitable.
Immigration Restriction
Immigration restrictions advanced in the Progressive Era were shaped by a combination of eugenic logic (Cohen, 2017) and a desire to protect the racial advantages of White laborers (Roediger & Esch, 2012; Takaki, 1998). These interests can be seen in a variety of measures that limited the numbers of Asians, Jews, and Eastern and Southern Europeans to enter the country as laborers while placing additional barriers ahead of Asians by barring them from becoming citizens or owning land. Exclusions of migrants from various Asian countries changed and shifted with certain nations being more preferred at times and more restricted at others. Changes to immigration policies were frequently sold to the public using the language of ability with national groups who were perceived to be more suited for specific tasks experiencing more liberty to migrate to the United States.
The most famous piece of legislation associated with immigration controls in this era is known as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and it prohibited Chinese laborers (merchants, teachers, and diplomats excluded) from migrating to the United States. In addition to the ableist assumptions that undergirded racially targeted immigration reforms, 1882 saw the introduction of expressly ableist language into federal immigration law. The Immigration Act of 1882 required immigration officials to examine and identify anyone entering the country who was “mentally or physically defective” and therefore “likely to become a public charge” (Nielsen, 2012, p. 108). The Alien Immigration Act of 1903 increased the list of undesirables to include “insane persons, epileptics, and persons who have been insane within five years previous; persons who have had two or more attacks of insanity at any time previously” (Sekerci & Altiraifi, 2018). Such individuals were then ejected from the country. In other words, anyone who was seen as unable to work was deemed a drain on society, and therefore not worthy of equal rights. Trained eugenicists were key figures in the enforcement in policing the entry of those deemed “mentally or physically defective” as they developed and implemented measurements and assessments at Elis Island and other ports of entry used to deny those they deemed unfit. These assessments included early iterations of intelligence tests that claimed to identify the “feebleminded” but since they were administered in English only, they served to discriminate against non-native English speakers and people with low levels of formal education (Cohen, 2017).
Mass Institutionalization
Although immigration restriction blocked those seen as genetically inferior from entering the country, mass institutionalization and forced sterilization prevented the reproduction of those deemed ‘unfit’ who were already in the United States. Forced institutionalization of people deemed disabled has a long history in the United States, starting in Virginia in the 1770s with gradual expansion into other states over the following 200 years (Segrest, 2021). Between the 1880s and the 1920s the United States saw a fourfold increase in the percentage of the population confined in psychiatric institutions (Whitaker, 2001).
The Progressive Era growth of these institutions also corresponds with a shift away from the previous era’s treatment model, known as the moral treatment, which encouraged, but did not guarantee, compassionate care for people with psychiatric or developmental disorders who were living in custodial facilities referred to as asylums (Wolfensberger, 1975). Many schools focused on creating supportive environments for PWD and helping them better integrate into their communities by providing social events, cultural opportunities, and adult education programs (Whitaker, 2001). By the Progressive Era, administrators, policy makers, and industrial capitalists came to see the moral approach as too costly, and many wealthy Americans voiced objections to their tax dollars or private donations being used to fund it, preferring instead institutions based on the medical model (Bartlett, 2017). The medical model depicted PWD as doomed by their genetics, embodiments of divine punishment unable to commune with God (New International Version, 2011, Lev 21: 16–21), and undeserving of the opportunity to live independent lives, implying that it was futile to provide them any mental or spiritual stimulation. The scientific and medical communities used this to rationalize institution-housed eugenics into the 1960s (Castles, 2002). It also provided a platform for individuals like Governor Butler of Massachusetts, who supported the devolution of schools into asylums (Rogers, 1898) using cost-cutting measures like eliminating educational programs for patients and reducing expenses on patient wellness, which dramatically contributed to overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and forced labor for patients in US institutional facilities (Porter, 2018; Segrest, 2021; Whitaker, 2001).
The increase of institutionalization was also fueled by highly subjective standards used to commit people to psychiatric institutions. The broad and loosely defined label of “unfit” was frequently used in diagnoses that led to people being committed to asylums, plantations, and other institutions that purported to treat and care for PWD. However, this label also became a tool to target poor people, racial minorities, unwed mothers, people who violated sexual taboos, including women who became pregnant out of wedlock, and people of any gender who engaged in romantic relationships that were homosexual or interracial (Catte, 2021; Cohen, 2017; Nielsen, 2012). With no clear diagnostic standards, community members with the wealth and education required to be considered upstanding citizens can and did wield their race, class, and gender privilege to force the institutionalization of people without access to such resources. For example, well-to-do heads of household were successful in having their house servants institutionalized when they became pregnant, despite considerable historical evidence suggesting that pregnancies were often the result of sexual assault by a woman’s employer (Catte, 2021).
Once individuals were committed, leaders of institutions frequently relied on the labor of those committed to maintain and run their facilities while depicting PWD as childlike adults who were happy to do drudgework and for whom forced labor could serve as a form of treatment for their disabilities (Segrest, 2021). Thus, people institutionalized for disabilities were often coerced into providing free labor. Additionally, there are documented cases of institutional leaders holding good workers longer than their treatments could justify benefitting from their work in a system that has been described as “institutional peonage” (Catte, 2021). For example, records reveal that by the 1950s Georgia’s Milledgeville State Hospital, which at various times in its history was the largest mental health treatment center in the United States, relied on coerced labor of inmates to provide approximately two thirds of the labor done at the facility and generated approximately $1.3 million (in 2019 dollars) per year (Segrest, 2021). Records from the 1880s indicate the same facility yielded approximately $300,0000 (in 2019 dollars) in income from inmate labor, and, while detailed financial records are not available for all years, other sources show that the Progressive Era oversaw massive expansions in its coerced labor operations. While this labor was defined as “therapeutic” in nature by institutional leaders and physicians, jobs included plantation labor in which conditions have been compared to experiences endured under slavery. Other jobs done by inmates included slaughtering livestock, construction, and working in industrial-style laundry facilities, all of which were rife with occupational hazards that led to physical maiming or mental scarring being inflicted on inmates under the guise of treatment. At racially integrated facilities Black Americans were consistently compelled to work in the least desirable, most dangerous, and most regimented jobs (Segrest, 2021).
One way to help clarify the conditions in which PWD were living and working is from the testimony of an individual who was a survivor of both a Virginia institution and a Nazi prisoner of war camp who explained the conditions in Virginia were more dehumanizing than conditions in Germany (Catte, 2021). In addition to exploitative working conditions for those committed to their care, these types of institutions also aggressively sterilized patients, often without their knowledge or consent. The leading proponents of forced sterilization were eugenicists who argued that forced sterilization was a more humane and cost-effective way of preventing the unfit from breeding as compared to long-term institutionalization. There also appears to have been some economic advantages to the sterilization of committed women, as certain powerful White men specifically sought to contract with mental institutions to procure access to “feeble-minded” women to work in their homes as domestics after they had been sterilized (Catte, 2021).
Eugenics and Educational Philosophy: The Case of Alexander Graham Bell, Eugenics, and Deaf Education
In addition to promoting legal restrictions and cultural taboos against PWD procreating, there was also an educational component to much of eugenic thought. For example, Alexander Graham Bell spent most of his energy and the considerable personal wealth he amassed from his patent of the telephone promoting the eugenics movement and his philosophy of Deaf education (Booth, 2021). To Bell, Deaf education that encouraged the use of American Sign Language (ASL) was dangerous to the broader American society because it encouraged the development of separate Deaf spaces and communities. Bell considered these spaces and communities dangerous because he believed that if Deaf people mostly associated with other Deaf people, they would end up falling in love with one another and that Deaf-on-Deaf marriages would increase the likelihood of Deaf children being born (Booth, 2021). Bell considered the teaching of lip reading and aural speaking techniques critical to both promote Deaf integration into the hearing world and to discourage the development of Deaf communities and relationships.
World War One: Soldiers Spark Societal Questions
The eugenics movement was not the only source of discrimination for PWD. The 1910s was a time of war, and the injured and disabled men returning from that war changed how society viewed disability for some, but not for all. In World War I the United States sent over 4 million military personnel to war, with at least 224,000 soldiers returning home with permanent physical or mental disabilities. These included 4,400 amputees, and approximately 100,000 had forms of psychological or mental disability (Reft, 2017). Many of these veterans faced the unknown when considering post-war employment options, unable to do some of the same jobs they held before leaving for their service. Historically, the United States offered veterans pensions, increasing them if soldiers needed compensation for loss of abilities (Gelber, 2005). Between their pensions and the respect afforded to them for their military service, veterans of WWI found themselves to be set apart from the “average” disabled person. The government compensated them for their disabilities, which allowed them more financial freedom, and gave them prosthetics and assistive devices when needed. The American public was able to see their disabilities as being the result of service, bravery, and sacrifice, making them deserving of support, which differentiated them from PWDs impacted by the moral, and in some ways, medical model. The circumstances surrounding the acquisition of their disabilities allowed disabled veterans to integrate back into society far more easily than a disabled person who did not have access to any of those supports. The result of this new class of disabled person was to create a hierarchy of value among PWD, where their earning potential determined their social value. There were PWD who established or retained their value in the eyes of the larger society by contributing to the war effort, PWD who were able to function and work independently, and those who needed assistance from others or were completely unable to work; the so-called drains on society who were perceived as taking more than they gave back. Veterans were able to avoid most of the public’s scorn for the disabled, but the policy on supporting disabled veterans changed when the United States passed two new federal policies – The Smith-Sears Veterans Rehabilitation Act, also known as the Soldiers’ Rehabilitation Act, and the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1918. Vocational rehabilitation offered disabled veterans the opportunities to learn new trades and develop skills that suited their new range of physical abilities. While the government continued to provide educational and financial support to veterans, vocational rehabilitation was a way to ensure that veterans would be able to earn a wage and avoid slipping further down the hierarchy (Library of Congress, n.d.; Gelber, 2005).
The Institute for Crippled and Disabled Men, founded in 1917 by the American Red Cross and led by director Douglas McMurtrie, passionately believed that a person’s value was set by their ability to work, and that disabled people had to become productive to earn the right to exist. McMurtrie defined disability by whether a man could work after returning home, which, in some ways, is an initial example of a shift to the economic model of disability which rises in prominence later (McMurtrie, 1919). The founding principles of McMurtrie’s program were that employment mitigated disability and, therefore, “the complete elimination of the dependent cripple has become a constructive and inspiring possibility. Idleness is the great calamity. Your service to the crippled man, therefore, is to find for him a good busy job, and encourage him to tackle it. Demand of the cripple that he get back in the work of the world, and you will find him only too ready to do so” (McMurtrie, 1919, p. 111). While this program supported returning soldiers, it faced the limitations of sexism and ableism by focusing on men with specific disabilities such as limb loss, hearing loss, or blindness sustained during military service. The country had yet to properly address disability employment as a broader issue by including people with born disabilities or intellectual disabilities.
World War Two: Rights Versus Rehabilitation
The period surrounding the Second World War included additional improvements for PWD’s employment prospects resulting from drastic changes to the available workforce. A workforce historically dominated by able-bodied White men suddenly found itself without its typical pool of applicants. As a result, industries turned to women, and over 6 million of them answered the call (National WWII Museum, 2023b). The war effort also opened employment opportunities for people with disabilities, allowing them to find employment that would otherwise not have been available. However, disabled Americans did not find employment easily (Jennings, 2016). Non-disabled women were struggling to prove themselves capable of doing the physically demanding labor men had left behind, and the doubt women faced in the industries was far greater for people with disabilities. World War II veterans disabled by the war were able to leverage the public’s sympathy and patriotism to advocate for better workplace opportunities as well. Unfortunately, while small groups began to develop around the country and offer vocational training and employment, disability advocacy continued to face attitudinal barriers on the federal level that slowed progress (Jennings, 2016). The programs the federal government developed reinforced the idea that some disabilities could be “fixed,” at least to an acceptably productive standard. It was a frustrating combination of the medical model’s and economic model’s foundational principles and goals. Focused on curing aspects of a disabled person that impacted their productivity, it was the government’s duty to identify potential workers who seemed able enough to treat with training (Jennings, 2016). For those who could meet the standards set forth by the government, it meant gaining access to training and employment and benefiting from wartime economic prosperity. For many others, it meant continuing to face exclusion from work related learning opportunities while advocating for policies and ideas that would see value in a person regardless of their disability status.
Continued Rehabilitation Efforts
The “whole man theory of rehabilitation,” a psychoanalytic theory used to try to treat personalities rather than symptoms, took hold in the US immediately post-WWII (O’Brien, 2001). Proponents of this theory claimed that effective treatment could not address parts of the person piecemeal, that treating the whole person required interventions that influenced the whole person, and that development of certain personality traits would be the most effective way to influence the whole person. Thus, PWD’s personalities could be considered the source of their health problems and correcting a flawed or “sick” personality would effectively rehabilitate a person with a disability. According to this logic, PWD just needed to improve their dispositions to overcome their disabilities. Policymakers adopted this theory and reshaped rehabilitation policy to embrace normalcy as the standard and goal of the process. They then leveraged the post-WWII patriotic zeitgeist to equate rehabilitation with democratization and a healthy, productive society (O’Brien, 2001).
Sheltered workshops, a segregated approach to employment that was meant to cater to the perceived abilities and productivity potential – of PWD, became the primary form of vocational rehabilitation, with the number of workshops doubling between 1950 and 1965 (Nelson, 1971). Disabilities were seen as something that individuals could compensate for to become “normal” contributing members of that society, evident in one of the stated missions of the Sheltered Workshop for the Disabled, Inc.—“Teach the handicapped that he must accept the responsibilities of a wage earner and a good citizen” (Nelson, 1971, p. 41). At their conception, workshops were developed to serve young adults placed in state schools, which were permanent institutional living facilities. Certain sectors of industry saw the residential population as untapped labor pools and began housing production within state schools (Shkurkin, 2023). A significant percentage of the work being done was singular and task-oriented, performed by those with physical disabilities, like certain assembly-line tasks during the war. The work was simple, low-risk, and easy to check. Additionally, workshop settings were able to fully embrace their perceptions of productivity and use Section 14c of the Fair Labor Standards Act to pay subminimum wage based on the evaluation that their workers were substandard (Bagenstos, n.d.). Wages under Section 14c were calculated based on employers’ measurements of disabled employees’ production value against non-disabled standards, a practice that persists today.
However, as the country emerged from the war, these designated workshops continued with their program and production structures. The major changes workshops saw were that they broadened the population of clients they served to include people with intellectual disabilities (ID). Sheltered work activities gave people with ID the sense or illusion of employment, while ableist systems devalued any previous residential work to avoid fair compensation and clung to the benefits the segregated, ableist employment model offered: work was done with little cost to the employers (Beckwith, 2016). Sheltered workshops still claimed their mission was the one on which they founded themselves—to provide development through training programs. The issue with the claim, which persists today, is that many people who entered these training programs stayed there indefinitely. Additionally, sheltered workshops tended to hold 14c waivers, which, according to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, allowed them to pay below the federal minimum wage without any minimum wage requirements.
Over and over, a person’s rights were measured by the cost of providing them. The Eisenhower administration implemented the Rehabilitation Act of 1954, but it required lobbyists to demonstrate its cost effectiveness and stress that there would be a return on the investment (O’Brien, 2001). Unsurprisingly, the practice of rehabilitation focused on vocational adjustment and employment matching for PWD to prevent individuals from becoming economic burdens (Nelson, 1971; O’Brien, 2001). Advocates of the whole man theory attempted to extend the theory by claiming the same rehabilitation model would also work for people experiencing poverty (O’Brien, 2001). They labeled poverty a psychiatric issue that could be cured by changing one’s mindset, which reinforced the idea that PWD comprise an inferior socioeconomic class while demonizing both the poor and PWD together using language reminiscent of the eugenics movement.
Connections Between Ableism and Racism
Historical explorations of the phenomena underscore the deep connections between ableism and racism. Those who have oppressed particular racial groups have often leveraged the rhetoric of deficiency used against PWD, regardless of their disability status (Fanon, 1952; Marriott, 2000). Thus, disability has been used as a blanket criterion for denying the rights of citizenship to a variety of groups. Perhaps the most salient examples of this process are demonstrated in the way that ableism has been leveraged in anti-Black racism. White people have claimed that Black people were too mentally deficient to deserve equal access the citizenship rights they were constitutionally guaranteed, such as access to the ballot, and that being unable to read or write English is proof that Black people were inherently intellectually disabled, even while actively promoting policies and practices that excluded Black people from opportunities to learn these skills (Segrest, 2021). White people have also used the purported mental deficiencies of people of African descent to rationalize enslavement, segregation, and other manifestations of White supremacy (DuBois, 1920). After the formal abolition of slavery, leading White mental health professionals advanced the idea that freedom was psychologically damaging to Black people and long-term incarceration combined with regimented plantation-style labor was the most viable treatment model for the forms of insanity freedom wrought on the Black psyche (Segrest, 2021). Additionally, during the Progressive Era Whites pathologized Black religious practices and rationalized life-long incarceration of Black people for praying and worshiping in ways that were culturally normative in their communities. The overlap persists in modern times as well. Research consistently points to assumptions and labels of disability being disproportionately assigned to students of color (National Center for Learning Disabilities, 2020). As they age into adulthood, labels and diagnoses follow Black people at a higher percentage, making them the most represented race in the disability community. They also struggle with exclusion from the labor market at an incredibly high rate, with 75% of Black PWD experiencing unemployment (Goodman et al., n.d.). Such a high number reflects the intersection of ableist and racist ideals and practices that perpetuate gatekeeping, often denied through sweeping community generalizations about work ethic and ability.
Implications for Practice
In the subsequent sections we will highlight areas of historical continuity between the current employment conditions for PWD and key themes from disability history identified by this study, which demonstrate a historical origin for the workplace discrimination that PWD commonly experience - economic and sexual exploitation in the workplace, lack of acceptance, and lack of access to accommodations.
Economic and Sexual Exploitation
People in the disability community who are left with few employment options and are deemed unable to benefit from integrative, community-based services are typically guided or turn to sheltered workshops. Employers who run sheltered workshops often hold 14c waivers that exempt them from minimum wage laws (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2023). Over half of PWD laboring in sheltered workshops have an average wage of $3.50 an hour, or $150 per week for an employee working full-time. This is about $3000 less per year than if they were to live off Supplemental Security Insurance (SSI) from Social Security. The low wages provided by many of these workshops combined with the fact that participants often experience little to no practical skills development (Disability Rights Texas, 2016), show that sheltered workshops are often simply the latest iteration of employers exploiting PWD for profit while promoting their efforts as benevolent acts of social entrepreneurship.
In the Progressive Era we saw how forced sterilization of women with disabilities made it easier for economically privileged white men to exploit them sexually as well as economically (Catte, 2021; Segrest, 2021). PWD continue to be especially vulnerable to sexual assault. For example, 20% of female and 25% of male survivors of rape are PWD. While the authors could not locate any research specifically focusing on the workplace sexual harassment of PWD, its prevalence in history and in the broader contemporary society is highly suggestive of this being an underexplored issue.
Lack of Acceptance in the Workplace
Individuals with disabilities often find it difficult to obtain employment (Kulkarni & Lengnick-Hall, 2014), and when they do, they may be forced to navigate a difficult and treacherous landscape to gain acceptance in the workplace. How one navigates this landscape may depend on their position in the hierarchy of disability. Just as World War I and II veterans were given preferential treatment compared to other PWD who were not considered as valuable due to their relative inability to work, the contemporary disability hierarchy thinking indicates that the less burdensome society views a person’s disability, the higher on the hierarchy they are (Dolmage, 2014). A higher position on the hierarchy guarantees additional rights or affordances that are not granted to those below them. In the workplace, this translates to lower rates of employment; for example, PWD who are unable to perform self-care tasks like readying themselves or independently using the restroom are the least employed, with employment rates at 17%, while members of the Deaf community and/or those with hearing disabilities have the highest employment rate at 54%. Whether it be enslavers seeking refunds for defective chattel, immigration restrictions against people believed to be disabled, forced labor in state schools and institutions, or sub-minimum wage renumeration for PWD working in sheltered workshops and for 14c certificate holders in the community, American policy makers and employers have evolved a variety of practices and rationales to continue the long-term trend of casting PWD as economic burdens while exploiting their labor to maximize profits. This trend continues today as many employers treat PWD as a bad investment. Hiring managers still perceive applicants with disabilities as being inherently less competent than others (Kulkarni & Lengnick-Hall, 2014; Speach et al., 2022). Speach et al. (2022) further found that employers tend to view employees with disabilities as costing more to an organization than someone without any disabilities. Employers’ negative perceptions of PWD contribute greatly to low labor participation rates for this group. In 2022, the disability unemployment rate was twice as high as for those without disabilities (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023). Additionally, PWD live in poverty at more than twice the rate of people without disabilities and PWD make up approximately 12% of the U.S. working-age population while accounting for more than half of those living in long-term poverty (National Council on Disability, 2017).
Lack of Access to Workplace Accommodations
Difficulty accessing workplace accommodations that allow a person to perform their job to the best of their ability create problems for many PWD (Kulkarni & Lengnick-Hall, 2014). Accommodations can be tangible items such as ergonomic keyboards, or intangible allowances, like giving an employee additional time during the workday to deal with a chronic health issue or attend regular doctor’s appointments. Whether an employer provides an accommodation is subject to the decision-maker’s understanding of the term and can be adversely affected by their perception of the person making the request and that person’s position on the disability hierarchy. When employers view PWD as less valuable, they often try to avoid investing in them either by not hiring PWD or by failing to provide the accommodations they need to thrive in the workplace (Kulkarni & Lengnick-Hall, 2014). This difficulty has at least two determining factors. One is PWD’s hesitation to self-advocate for fear of discrimination resulting from their disclosure and worries that they will be seen as burdens on the organization. Another factor is that employers are not legally required to grant accommodations that they define as presenting an undue burden, which allows them to deny accommodations requests when they perceive the financial costs of accommodations to be too burdensome to the organization or to other employees (Kulkarni & Lengnick-Hall, 2014; Kwon, 2021). When organizations do hire PWD and fulfill accommodation requests, it is often due to employers perceiving potential value in a particular candidate; in this way, employers may view accommodations as an investment upon which they expect a return. In addition to perceiving a financial upside to an investment in accommodations, organizations may find other reasons to fulfill requests from PWD. For example, it is common for organizations to fulfill requests for less expensive or highly visible accommodations to signal their organization’s support for the disability community and engender goodwill from the public while failing to act on requests that are more costly or less visible—even as accommodations of the later variety are often needed to provide meaningful support to PWD (Kwon & Archer, 2022).
Implications for Theory
Scholarly research has an equally important role to play in enhancing the field’s understanding of disability. such as employing the social model of disability as a lens through which to conduct additional investigation, expanding work on disability theory to recognize a human rights model, and increasing collaboration on research and activism at the intersections of race, disability, gender, class, and sexual orientation.
Embracing the Social Model of Disability
The social model views disability as being relative to society’s perception of it; for example, if a person in a wheelchair cannot enter a building because there are only stairs and no ramp, the medical model says that using a wheelchair is the problem. The social model says that the stairs are what actually disable that person, because they have the same right to enter the building as someone who can walk up the stairs. This model challenges us to critically reflect on our assumptions about disability. Kwon (2021) points out that “a small but increasing amount of research on ableism emphasizes the role of language in interrogating the process through which non-disability becomes a normative organizing principle against disability” (p. 181). Additional research into disability from the perspective of the social model has the potential to help dismantle ableism by shifting both the theoretical and practical conversations about disability in the workplace to reposition employees with disabilities as complete and productive just the way they are.
Recognizing the Human Rights Model
The social model of disability identifies external barriers as the true disabling force in a person’s life instead of their physical or mental health (Lawson & Beckett, 2021). The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities takes this concept further by looking at ableism as a human rights issue (Lawson & Beckett, 2021). This convention stressed the fundamental humanity of PWD that transcends their disability status. The HRD community should embrace a transformative research paradigm to create an approach for communicating and interacting with the disability community in the workplace. This paradigm functions by prioritizing “the pursuit of social justice and the furtherance of human rights” (Munger & Mertens, 2011, p. 25) and acknowledges the need for researchers to engage in open dialogue with study subjects to understand the cultural context of their lives. HRD professionals can engage in meaningful conversation with individual employees who can openly discuss the ways in which ableism has affected them. These conversations give others the opportunity to see and respond to their humanity instead of viewing them as a statistic that affects their bottom line.
Continuing HRD Research and Activism
It is critical that future research on disability rights and workplace discrimination include additional work on conceptual histories of disability in the United States that cover other time periods than the one covered in this paper and/or are guided by different analytical frames. Archival and oral histories connecting experiences with disability to workplace and adult education literature would also enhance understanding of the topic. Additionally, globalism’s effect on the workforce and the nature of work obligates researchers to investigate disability histories of different nations and regions that look at how workplace disability issues have evolved in contrasting historical contexts. Also, research is needed into the concept of the hierarchy of disability, which has considerable traction in disability rights advocacy circles (Dolmage, 2014) and is growing in popularity in academia (Meyers et al., 2024), but remains unresearched within HRD. Furthermore, research should integrate the prevalence of sexual harassment of PWD in the workplace. Finally, there is clear documentation of gaps in wages, employment rates, and other key financial indicators along lines of race, gender, and disability, but it is difficult to find data that examines the intersections of these areas. Given the clear historical connections between racism, sexism, and ableism, future research should seek to disaggregate data in ways that would allow for intersectional appraisals of the labor market realities of people with multiple marginalized identities.
Conclusions
As demonstrated by the history of disability in the United States, ableism is deeply engrained within the social and economic fabrics of the nation and of organizations that operate within it. This suggests that rather than only attempting to respond to individual instances of ableism, the HRD community should work on broader efforts towards “removing the policing and enforcement of normality” (Annamma et al., 2013, p. 18). Defining someone by their abilities has become a sociopolitical act in the context of the capitalist workplace, driven by a historical dependence on physical work that no longer applies to the same extent as it did when the country was founded. As ableism gradually became ingrained in America’s conception of rights and citizenship, it shaped how we think and speak of people with disabilities. In the 30 years since the ADA was passed, legal issues of equity for PWD persist. Contemporary ableism rears its head in immigration law as lawmakers say the quiet part aloud and suggest that we determine an immigrant’s right to enter the United States by their earning potential and whether they are disabled (Perez, 2019). Putting workplace discrimination against PWD in its proper historical and economic context demonstrates the complexity of disability identity and the multitude of ways in which leaders and lawmakers manipulate the use of the term to their benefit. We must confront this injustice to guarantee that everyone in the workplace, the United States, and the world receives the fair treatment that they deserve to as human beings.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
