Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale (eds), Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 1850-1979

Abstract

Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale have produced an extensive collection of papers that explore the experiences of disabled children from a broad range of perspectives. Covering a period of 130 years, from 1850 onwards, the twelve chapters focus on a variety of disabilities and offer examples of care and welfare provision not only from the UK, but also Sweden, Spain and Australia. This collection, based on papers presented at a conference organised by the editors in 2007, does not attempt to follow a thematic approach to childhood disability; the range of disabilities included would make that a difficult, if not impossible, task. Instead the chapters are presented in chronological order, allowing the reader to follow the progression of the development of service provision, attitudes towards the care of disabled children and the nature of the lived experience of this group who are often neglected in disability discourses. The book sets out to identify the ways in which children's lives have been influenced by both their disability and the responses of caregivers towards the children. Despite the apparent lack of thematic arrangements, several themes emerge that cross the time span of the book and which can be found in both the British examples and beyond. One of the most important of these is the status of the home and the family as contested places for the provision of care and support for disabled children. Time and again, an attitude of ‘the state knows best’ comes through from the various source materials and the official preference for institutional care, rather than care provided by the family and in the home, is evident. For example, Mike Mantin shows how letters from the Cambrian Institution's Principal imposed a certain set of standards, values and behaviours on the parents of deaf children during home visits, effectively extending the school's role into the home and treating family members almost as surrogate pupils themselves, under the direct guidance of their child's teachers. Sue Wheatcroft, focusing on the Second World War period, shows that this attitude was still evident through the Child Guidance Movement, which emphasised the primacy of residential care for disabled children. Staffan Förhammar and Marie Nelson show that this was also true of the way Swedish medical authorities operated through the establishment of an isolation hospital in a fashionable spa town. By providing care in this way, the concept of ‘home’ often came to mean something significantly different for disabled children to that of the family home, with both beneficial and detrimental consequences for all parties.