Radical ideas of early disability activists in the 1920s and 1930s

Description

Abstract: Writing disability history from a first-person perspective is complicated because disabled people have often been excluded from the historical record and thus from social history research (Mitchell & Snyder, 2023). In our paper we analyse first-person texts written by disabled activists in the 1920s and 1930s in Austria and in Norway. In the nineteenth century, deaf and blind people were pioneers in organising, and people with physical disabilities followed in the early twentieth century with the establishment of self-help associations.

The data consists of 40 magazine articles written by Siegfried Braun in Austria and Toralf Sandvig in Norway, for people with physical disabilities and their allies. Identifying their main issues, problems, opinions and demands is the focus of our research. In addition to an in-depth analysis of the first-person texts, we carry out a cross-national analysis.

We contextualised and interpreted the magazine texts as part of the historical period in which they were written: the period between the two world wars and before the expansion of the welfare state. Our findings show that both were outstanding activists with physical disabilities in their national associations and had ideas about the problems of disabled people that can be compared with the contemporary disability movement. Although one lived in Norway and the other in Austria, their writings often addressed the devaluation and discrimination of disabled people. They repeatedly called for rights, education, employment and sufficient resources to live independently and with dignity. Both were very committed to promoting self-esteem and self-help in their peer group, and both were internationally oriented, closely following developments in disability policy in other countries.

Mitchell, D. T., & Snyder, S. L. (2023). A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Period	08 May 2025
Event title	17th NNDR Conference: Disability in local and global contexts
Event type	Conference
Location	Helsinki, FinlandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International