Progressive Era Women in Special Education

While special education has taken significant advances in recent decades, throughout the world, its history did not begin in the 1960s. Generations earlier, reformers, often women, were beginning to establish the underpinnings of pedagogical and therapeutic approaches to children whose disabilities seemed to require alternative means of education, as well as the bureaucratic and professional cultures that have developed to provide those alternatives. These women worked in various national contexts, from a wide array of motives and backgrounds; they shared an era of innovation and unprecedented opportunity for women's participation in policy making and the development of theory.

The numbers of women activists who took a role in Progressive-era beginnings of special education are impressive and may be explained by several factors. Reformers in the Progressive era were often especially drawn to the problems of children in cities, immigrant children, and other young people in apparent crisis. Through the settlement movement and similar ventures, reform-minded women's groups sought reforms that some term “maternalist” because they imposed middle-class notions of femininity, hygiene, and domestic relations on the working-class objects of their charity. While many of these reforms seem uncontroversial today—child labor regulation, milk safety, kindergartens, urban playgrounds, and parks—others cast grave suspicions on families that could not easily conform to the domestic ideals proposed. And among the latter were measures to identify and segregate children with special educational needs, especially those associated with eugenic “defect.”

Meanwhile, newly opened opportunities in medicine, education, government, and law gave some individual women professional credentials and expertise for establishing programs. Women working in the public schools as teachers and administrators saw the need for separate classes and methods for educating “misfit” students; women with medical training working in such positions as health inspectors, home visiting nurses, and clinic doctors saw the children unserved by public schools on account of their disabilities and the ways they might be otherwise educated. As the field of special education was new, it held great potential as a niche where professional women might gain positions of significant authority, without encountering resistant, entrenched networks. In addition, the specialties of pediatric medicine, public health nursing, and eugenics research were unusually accepting of women's expertise, with the added assumption that any endeavor that involved children or health appealed to a “natural” talent inherent in the female sex.

Among the many women whose names appear in the era's history of special education, only a few can be mentioned here. Italian doctor Maria Montessori (1870–1952) is best known today as a pioneer in early childhood education, but she derived many of her theories during her stint as director of the State Orthophrenic School in Rome, where she performed direct teaching with “feebleminded” children as well as developing a teacher training program. In London, Mary Ward (1851–1920) was a novelist from a literary family when she became involved in philanthropy, founding the Passmore Edwards Settlement (now the Mary Ward Centre); among its offerings, beginning in 1898, was an innovative model day school for children with disabilities. A year after the English school opened, Elizabeth Farrell began teaching an ungraded class of boys in the New York City public schools, using a self-developed curriculum that emphasized individualized, practical skill building. Farrell, who would eventually found the Council for Exceptional Children, was part of a cluster of socially active women centered around public health nurse Lillian Wald (1867–1940), who founded the Henry Street Settlement and mentored Lina Rogers (the first public school nurse in the United States) and Margaret Sanger (the birth control activist). Meanwhile in Providence, Rhode Island, two medical doctors, Mary S. Packard and Ellen Stone, conducted a summer camp in 1907 for children with tuberculosis, which would develop into school-year programming in specialized classrooms to serve students with special health needs. These stories must stand for those of many other women in the early twentieth-century history of special education.

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