Disabled Mothers

The term disabled mother includes any woman living with a disability who also parents children. However, “disabled mothers” cannot be understood as a stable category, but instead as a set of changing definitions and attitudes with regard to both disability and mothering. What constitutes disability varies across cultures and history and greatly depends on material and social conditions and ideological beliefs and values at a given moment in human history.

From Classical antiquity to the current postmodern era, a range of meanings has been ascribed to disability—from a sign of divine glorification or punishment, or later an outward mark of inner moral character, to a common condition of the poor and an index of social position, to biological and then medicalized definitions that led to a therapeutic model of correction or restoration, and then to critiques of medicalization, and the social and political models of disability.

Efforts to characterize “disabled mothers” are further complicated by androcentric histories, which [Page 289]report elite male achievements of state and war. The few available representations of everyday life often generalize lived realities and overlook the lives of women or the disabled as particular and not universal. As a result, it is difficult to know the numbers of mothers with disability or what they would have experienced in daily life. Certainly, women with disability did bear and parent children; disease and illness and their effects would have been common in earlier ages.

However, ascertaining the number of women born with disability surviving to reproductive age proves impossible. The outright discouraging of women with disability from bearing children probably did not occur until the eugenics era of the early 20th century. Such prohibition is no longer overt, but its legacy remains in genetic and popular discourses and in the lack of social supports for mothers with disability.

Histories of disability argue that perceptions about disability fell into two categories in antiquity: disability as a sign of the gods or an omen, both requiring interpretation. Individuals bearing visible anomalies of the human form could be read as monstrous or as signs of special powers, e.g., as an omen of future events or a sign of the ability to prophesize. Intellectual disabilities or mental illness could be read as signs of demonic power. Alternately, disability was seen as illness or weakness brought on as punishment from the gods or fates.

In both categories, disability was understood as interpretable, as either divine or malign. Unlike later perceptions of disability, both positive and negative, there was no sense that disability was an inheritable or a general human condition. Given the prevalence of disease and illness among men and women, and disfigurement resulting from war, famine, and epidemics, the experience of a weakened or impaired body was likely widespread; however, much of what today might be marked out as disability may have gone unremarked. Extant texts and visual depictions suggest that the while the disabled were not excluded from public life, most women were confined to the private sphere of children, slaves, and chattel. No doubt there were mothers with disability, but high infant and maternal mortality made their survival even more difficult than for nondisabled women.

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