Dis/abled Bodies: Capitalism, Gender, and the Meaning of "Work"

A seaman abandoned at port after losing a leg. Teeth rotted out by radium poisoning. A hand crushed in a laundry mangle.  As labor activists have long argued, capitalism has for centuries left in its wake a trail of disabled bodies. However vivid, this indictment rings flat historically.  Just as the kinds of disabilities produced by capitalist labor economies have a history—a history complicated by labor force segmentation by gender and race—so too do the ways in which people with various “disabled” bodies have been categorized in relation to “work.” This paper highlights three aspects. First, within rural and working-class communities, disabling injuries were so common that they served as a marker of poverty, if not class itself.  Families understand productivity as a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability.  Newly “disabled” workers continued to labor.  But with the rise of mechanized factory labor in the early twentieth century, employers in nearly all economic sectors demanded workers with intact, fully functional bodies.  Second, employers’ beliefs that certain races or genders fit particular jobs has long ensured unequal distribution of hazards and thereby disabilities—a situation compounded by policymakers’ racialized and gendered assumptions about health and “fitness.” Third, the boundaries of “work” have been demarcated not only by the actual labor performed but also by workers’ bodies.  Because of bodily function and appearance, disabled people’s labors—whether in institutions for the feeble-minded, sheltered workshops, or the gray market—have rarely been recognized or compensated as “work.”