Education: Lesson Details
Overview
Nineteenth-century America was rife with scandals about the treatment of people with disabilities. Some, including those written by the asylum reformer Dorothea Dix and the newspaper reporter Nellie Bly, were quite famous. The set of readings presented here provide examples involving people confined in a variety of institutions, written across the span of the century.
In 1843 Dix petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to improve care for people with mental disabilities, then held in local jails and poorhouses, by expanding public insane asylums. In 1851 Isaac Hunt wrote from the perspective of a person confined in an institution of the type advocated by Dix. In 1873 Elizabeth Packard published her account of being unjustly committed by husband to an insane asylum in Illinois. In 1883 The Lowell Weekly Sun wrote a series of articles exposing horrible living conditions at the Massachusetts State Almshouse in Tewksbury. In 1887 Bly had herself committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island for a series of articles published in The New York World.
These documents raise important questions about the relationship between publicity and reform, about the persistent difficulties in changing conditions within institutions, and about how language shaped historical meanings of disability.
Questions To Consider
1.) As you read these nineteenth-century exposés, what changed in the conditions described? What stayed the same?
2.) Were any remedies proposed by the authors? If so, what were they?
3.) All the readings describe institutions. What were the intended purposes of each institution? What were the unintended consequences? Why did they apparently fail to provide humane conditions for people with disabilities? Why did the "circle of scandal" continue?
4.) What were the rhetorical strategies used in the readings? Were they effective? What do these rhetorical strategies suggest about the cultural meanings of disability in nineteenth-century America?