YYou can take two seemingly contradictory lessons from historian David Turner’s new book on disability in the UK. First, worryingly little has changed for disabled people since the beginning of the modern era (the book’s first few stories, about 17th-century men and women trying to prove they were disabled enough to receive parish support to avoid starvation, will be familiar to anyone who has tried to claim Personal Independence Payments). And second, that absolutely everything has changed – from the closure of asylums to the advent of prosthetics and finally, albeit belatedly, the inclusion of disability rights in law.
But the central logic of disability helps to bridge these two narratives into a coherent whole. Professor Turner, of Swansea University, explains that public and political attitudes towards disability have been poor, but disabled people have defied them at every level, making progress from even the most bleak circumstances. This is not the story of rights and dignity given from above, but of the people and communities who brought them into existence.
The broader perspective is based on incredible personal stories. We meet Duncan Campbell, an aristocrat who became a sensation as a deaf mental patient in the late 18th century, trading on myths and rumors related to his disability to increase his fame and credibility at a time when deafness was considered childish and equated with being uneducated. Or, two centuries later, May Billinghurst, the infamous “cripple suffragette” who used her special hand-powered tricycle to break through police lines and commit acts of civil disobedience. Or, even later, Megan Du Boisson, a housewife in the 1960s, who campaigned for the first disability benefits to be awarded solely on the basis of impairment, when existing schemes covered only those injured at work or in war, leaving out almost all disabled women.
What he has in common with many other people in the book is that he not only resisted the physical limitations imposed on him by society, but also rejected the assumptions that went with them. Therefore, the cumulative picture is not of a Dalit minority but one defined by ingenuity, determination and patience. This may be a new perspective for many non-disabled readers, but community members will find themselves and their friends recognizing qualities in people who lived hundreds of years ago. It is welcome to see this understanding of disability expressed so well in a book for a general audience.
An indication of the devaluation of disability activism and history is the fact that none of the personalities in the book are household names. May Billinghurst certainly deserves as much mention as Pankhurst, and we should know that it was the anti-apartheid activist Vic Finkelstein, who applied what he had learned in South Africa to Britain’s disability rights movement, who first expressed the idea of what became known as the social model of disability in the early 1970s, paving the way for activism that went far beyond calls for better financial support.
We should also know the names of William Hay, the 18th-century MP who Turner describes as the first person to write about disability as a personal identity, just as we should know the names of Barbara Lisicki and Alan Holdsworth, the punk couple who launched the successful campaign in the 1980s and 90s for Britain’s first comprehensive disability rights legislation. All fought mightily with governments and societies that wanted them to remain silent. Hopefully this book will give them the status and voice they deserve.
In showing how disabled people throughout history have rejected the stories imposed on them, Turner in turn rejects another false story: that disabled people are passive recipients of both discrimination and aid. This book tells another true story: that we have always resisted and have always struggled to make things better.
