The Largest Occupational Group of All the Disabled: Homemakers with Disabilities and Vocational Rehabilitation in Postwar America

Abstract

This chapter takes as its focus the vocational rehabilitation of homemakers with disabilities in the post-World War II United States. The postwar period witnessed a surge of interest in assisting disabled people to obtain gainful employment as well as a heightened emphasis on domesticity that stemmed largely from the postwar marriage and baby booms. At the nexus of these developments there emerged a network of policymakers, medical experts, home economists, inventors, and disabled women who sought to assist homemakers with disabilities to fulfill their domestic responsibilities and to carry out “normal” lives. While many of these efforts to rehabilitate disabled homemakers bolstered postwar domesticity, middle-class gender roles, and able-bodied normality, they also posed new challenges to them. Efforts to expand vocational rehabilitation for disabled homemakers not only hinged on a redefinition of homemakers as workers that presaged later feminist efforts to monetize housework, but they also drew on homemaking strategies already developed by people with disabilities, thereby forging connections to the independent living movement. Although homemaker rehabilitationists rarely used the term “rights,” their efforts intersected with and lent support to later movements aimed at improving the lives of both women and disabled people.