Education: Lesson Details

Overview

• 
  The State Almshouse in Bridgewater, Massachusetts
• 
  Anne Sullivan
• 
  Franklin B. Sanborn

 
The "Gilded Age," a term coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner to connote the post-Civil War era's extreme wealth and extreme poverty, was a particularly difficult time for people with disabilities. After the Civil War, economic and demographic changes undermined communal and familial supports while the strength of Social Darwinian thinking rendered any sort of governmental assistance unpopular. Anne Sullivan, the child of impoverished Irish immigrants and nearly blind from trachoma, was abandoned by her family following her mother's death. She and her younger brother, Jimmie, were placed in the Tewksbury State Almshouse. An almshouse, or poorhouse, was a publicly funded institution, originally administered locally, in which destitute and infirm individuals were provided with minimal means of survival.

The documents presented here follow Sullivan's experience up to the age of fourteen, when she successfully gained admission to the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind. In 1883, three years after Sullivan entered the Perkins, a scandal erupted in Massachusetts over conditions at Tewksbury. The resulting investigations provide images of Gothic horror and criminal abuse, images that reinforce Sullivan's later recollections of her years at the almshouse.

Why was life at the Massachusetts State Almshouse so deplorable? The materials presented here suggest the crucial role of Social Darwinism in devaluing people with disabilities, the poor, and certain ethnic groups. Anne Sullivan and her brother fell into all three of the categories defined as unfit. As a result, their lives were ones of almost unimaginable suffering.