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Capacity for Citizenship: Disability, Rights, and Resistance in the Early United States

Air date: Thursday, October 16, 2025, 2:00:00 PM
Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
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Description: In the decades after the American Revolution, citizens imposed significant restrictions on physically and intellectually disabled people’s legal, political, and social rights. Disabled people were barred, for example, from voting, marrying, holding property, making contracts, serving in the military, serving in public office, immigrating, and living freely and independently. This presentation examines how these exclusions were implemented and enforced, increasingly by physicians. Indeed, medicine became a powerful justification for these restrictions towards the mid-nineteenth century as physicians gained positions of authority in courts, institutions, and government offices. This history of structural ableism, however, is coupled by an equally powerful story of resistance. Disabled people contested the discrimination they faced, claiming over and again their capacity for citizenship.
Author: Laurel Daen, PhD – Assistant Professor of American Studies, University of Notre Dame
Runtime: 1 hour