Emma Wathen

My dissertation explores parenting with disabilities in the postwar United States. Historical scholarship about reproduction has rarely focused on the perspectives of disabled people as parents, in part because disabled people in the United States have historically faced significant state and social constraints on their reproductive decision-making. Using historical analysis and feminist disability studies, my dissertation examines how disabled people created and maintained families in the second half of the twentieth century while navigating legal, medical, and social resistance. While parent activism in disability history has traditionally referred to activism by nondisabled parents on behalf of their disabled children, I instead turn my attention to disabled parents who fought for parenting rights and support under and outside the banner of activism. I analyze their actions against the shifting landscapes of family policing systems, whose surveillance and power expanded in the second half of the twentieth century, and disability rights activism, whose growth and liberatory potential was hampered by inattentiveness to reproductive issues. My chapters focus on “polio mothers” who shared their child-rearing adaptations with home economists in the 1950s; Deaf and Little People couples who sought to adopt children diagnosed with deafness and dwarfism in the 1960s and ’70s; parents with cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities who fought to retain custody of their children in the 1980s; and disabled feminist activists who launched reproductive rights campaigns centered on the needs of disabled mothers in the 1990s. Ultimately, my dissertation illuminates a legacy of family-making and activism by disabled parents that combats their depiction as passive, dependent, and nonsexual.