Dissertation Chapter: State-Level and Local Associations Led by Blind People in the Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century United States
Abstract: This dissertation chapter draft explores the formation, activities, and legacies of state-level and local associations led by blind people in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. These blind-led associations sought to challenge some of the ways in which the specific forms of ableism of their period marginalized many blind adults from full economic and social citizenship. The associations were founded and operated across the United States, though, in step with wider reform trends, they were most represented in the midwestern, northern, and western states. Leaders in the organizations tended to be (though were not always) blind women and men who were also middle-class and white. These American blind-led associations emerged from network connections related to the state residential schools for blind children which had been operating in the United States since the 1830s. The schools had channeled many of the social hierarchies of their regional and national contexts, which manifested in the exclusion or relegation within internal school hierarchies of Indigenous, Black, non-white immigrant, and poor blind people. These power dynamics in the schools were in turn reproduced when they and their alumni organizations became incubators of blind-led association-building after the American Civil War. While the blind-led associations emerged from the schools, they simultaneously represented a departure from and a challenge to the priorities of the schools and the superintendents who managed them. Unlike the schools, the associations explicitly valued blindness as a form of expertise in leadership. Furthermore, the associations primarily sought to serve blind adults rather than children. The chapter reconstructs the activities of these associations through archival research in collections related to blindness history, as well as through analysis of sources identified through keyword searches in digitized newspaper databases and other online corpora. It argues that the wider reform landscape of American “Progressive Era” organizing shaped the composition and trajectories of the blind-led associations. This context furthermore conditioned the associations’ achievements and their legacies, including the limitations of those achievements and legacies.
Madeline (Maddie) Williams is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. She is working on her dissertation on the history of organizing led by blind people in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. During the 2021-2022 academic year, she was a Dissertation Fellow at the CHSTM. For the Fall 2022 semester, she is teaching an undergraduate seminar on “Disability in American History” as a Stephen A. Walsh History Prize Instructor at Harvard.
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