A study by historian Lucy Delap suggests we need to rethink the experiences of people with learning disabilities in the 20th century. Here she explains how many thrived in work and wider society
Many histories of people with learning disabilities focus on segregation. But although in the 19th and early 20th centuries there was a push to move them into asylums, that never affected the majority. Most lived outside such institutions and had to work. Historians haven’t looked much at lives in the community – yet that represented most people with learning disabilities.
My research covered most of the 20th century, until its closing decades saw major economic changes caused by deindustrialisation and the rise of new forms of work associated with computers, and new expectations of school qualifications. Those things had a real impact on the lives of people with learning disabilities, increasingly cutting them out of labour opportunities.
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Until relatively recently, broad definitions included terms we wouldn’t use today, such as ‘mental deficiency’ or ‘handicap’. Those encompassed all kinds of cognitive impairments as well as those whose lives just didn’t quite fit the mould – troubled adolescents, people involved in petty crime, or those deemed promiscuous.
Indeed, young women who got pregnant outside marriage were sometimes called ‘moral imbeciles’. We wouldn’t recognise those people today as having any kind of learning disability.
Employment rates among people with learning disabilities varied between about 40 and 70 per cent in the first half of the 20th century. It was quite gendered: men were much more likely to be in paid employment than women, who tended to do housework or informal childcare. These numbers were very high compared to today, when fewer than 5 per cent of people with learning disabilities are employed.
There’s lots of evidence to suggest that, in the past, people we would recognise as having learning difficulties were successfully integrated into paid employment. That spanned different sectors – factories, workshops, extractive industries, the steel industry, and service-sector jobs with public contact.
They weren’t all stuck in a cupboard somewhere, putting things in boxes or bags. Some were, but others were digging graves, sweeping the streets, emptying bins and working in hospitals doing low-level nursing jobs.
Some were fairly well-paid, and even founded their own businesses. Certainly, some were stuck permanently on the very lowest entry-level wages doing very boring work, and few had roles that required professional qualifications, but there was an amazingly broad spectrum of employment.
I’m fascinated by a man who called himself Hugh McGowan, though he appears under a number of other names in the archive. He fought in the First World War, but had a chequered time in the army: he was disciplined several times, so wasn’t a perfect soldier.
He was injured in battle, invalided out and sought a military pension, but doctors said he didn’t qualify because he had a pre-existing disability – they termed him ‘backward’ or ‘mentally defective’. He contested that decision, writing lots of letters from 1921 right up to 1963, when he was 89.
In them, McGowan describes his life – and it wasn’t an easy life, because he existed right on the economic margins. When he had enough money, he would buy goods and sell them on for a fractional profit. He was convicted of theft, having stolen boots, bacon and other petty items, as well as being drunk and disorderly.
So he repeatedly came to the attention of the authorities – though, he claimed in one of his letters, the authorities had “got me all rong”. He was employed in various roles: shovelling coal, working in a power station, even as a fisherman – and he was very proud of never having claimed any kind of unemployment benefit.
His is an example of the amazing diversity of experiences of people labelled and othered by the authorities, but who lived quite independently of systems of care and control.
I’m not suggesting there was a golden age for people with learning disabilities, because they did encounter stigma and hardship. Many found economic niches, but often had to struggle to maintain them, and to assert their right to citizenship and participation.
One interesting shift came in the 1950s, when ideas of resource management, human resources and productivity came to the fore. When attempts were made to modernise and improve efficiency in British workplaces, it became harder for people with learning disabilities to find their economic niche and to keep up with the pressure to gain educational qualifications.
In the second half of the 20th century, when everyone had the right to attend secondary school and when the wages of school leavers rose, those who didn’t have those educational opportunities – who didn’t go to school, or were in the special school system – suffered because they emerged without qualifications. And as more and more British young people gained school qualifications, and employers increasingly expected them, it became harder to get a job.
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People in asylums or hospitals also worked. They might work on licence for a local farmer, or in the wards of the hospital itself. So work experiences spanned segregated institutional lives as well as people in the wider community.
There is a wonderful memoir by David Barron – one of just a few written by people with intellectual disabilities. Born in 1925, he was fostered, and then, in his teens, placed in ‘mental deficiency institutions’, where he worked his socks off in fairly menial and quite exploitative jobs.
He wasn’t paid, or only in trivial ways – a sixpence or some chocolate. But when he finally got out of those institutions, he was very proactive in finding work. He loved watching films, and got a position in a cinema, helping the projectionist. He absolutely knew the value of having a job, and was able to navigate that on his own.
My research reveals a hopeful, optimistic story of resilience, of disabled people who were able to gain inclusion, to support themselves, to make meaningful lives and to develop and market their skills.
Disability history should be mainstream. It’s not a niche subject: an estimated 20 per cent of the population is living with a disability at any one time, and of course lots of people will move into or out of that category as their life circumstances change.
My research shows that much higher levels of inclusion are possible for people who are stigmatised or labelled disabled. Rather than believing the history of disabled people to be just one of pain, shame and exclusion, we can look back at the past and see that such people worked widely across different sectors. So we should challenge ourselves to ask: how could we make that possible again in the 21st century?
Lucy Delap is professor in modern British and gender history at the University of Cambridge. Her research is published in the Social History of Medicine journal