Based on such an avalanche of woe, Kanner assumed that these women—and the rest of us who are now suffering the social consequences of their unwise releases—would have been better off if they’d have been kept for life at Rosewood and away from the rest of the world. So while it’s clear enough that Wolf was the bad guy in this embarrassing American tale, was Kanner really the good guy? This was an example of an ideological struggle among the upper crust in the period. On one side, there were those who wanted to use the state (through the courts, habeas writs, etc.) to supply them with cheap labor through the super-exploitation of people with disabilities. On the other side, there were those who wanted to use the state to quarantine and sterilize disabled folks because they saw people with disabilities as a drain on the wealth they had stolen from workers as a whole in the first place. It would still be a few decades until people with disabilities would do mass organizing in their own interests.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 13:01:09 +0000
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