Disabled Children, Gender, and the State: The U.S. Children's Bureau, Social Security, and the 'Crippled' Child

In 1935, the Social Security Act wrote concern for disabled children into the United States welfare state. Alongside old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, public assistance for children and blind people living in poverty, and various public health programs, the act inaugurated federal support of a number of programs that targeted “crippled” children—the bulk of the children served by the program in its early years had poliomyelitis, cerebral palsy, or clubfoot. The act provided for federal grants to states that aimed at recording information about the prevalence of childhood disability and extending health care to disabled children, including funding for medical, surgical, and rehabilitative care and the establishment of facilities and clinics for diagnosis and treatment. By 1943, the federal government invested over $4.3 million in the program annually, funding, for example, over 1.4 million days of hospital care and nearly 200,000 physical therapy sessions in 1941 alone. While the program served hundreds of thousands of children annually, thousands of children remained on waiting lists for services. Still, the program suggests a number of important questions about the relationship between disability, gender, citizenship, and the state that will be the focus of this paper. I argue that disability’s perceived power to disrupt households, families, and individuals’ ability to uphold prevailing gender roles shaped the U.S. investment in direct health care for disabled children.