ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“I Am an ‘Iron-Lung’ Mother”: Polio Mothers and Homemaker Rehabilitation in the Postwar United States.

• In Event: Disability Sciencing: Measuring and Classification at Sites of Knowledge-Making

English Abstract

When polio ravaged through American communities in the mid-twentieth century, the disease left a significant number of young women with physical disabilities at a time when Americans were marrying and having children in greater numbers than ever before. Histories of polio and motherhood have typically focused on the non-disabled mothers who marched on behalf of their children during the Mothers’ March on Polio in the 1950s. My paper instead centers the perspective of self-proclaimed “polio mothers” who found themselves trapped between two contradictory societal expectations: that their gender predisposed them to maternity and their disability precluded them from maternity. Drawing from homemaker rehabilitation projects, memoirs, and newspapers, I argue that polio mothers positioned themselves as experts in adaptive parenting by working alongside home economists and March of Dimes officials, even as they navigated scrutiny about their maternal fitness. By publicizing their private acts of mothering in homemaker rehabilitation projects and popular media, these polio mothers reinforced their belonging within the status quo of the white, middle-class nuclear family at a time when women with disabilities faced widespread skepticism about their suitability as wives and mothers. They also called attention to the reproductive needs of polio survivors at a time when support and funding for polio survivors was in decline following the success of the Salk vaccine in 1955. Working within the frameworks of medical rehabilitation and normative gender hierarchies helped position polio mothers as respectable domestic experts who merited neither skepticism nor pity.

Author

• Emma Wathen, University of Wisconsin-Madison