No Right to Be Idle

“Accessible writing and evocative case studies across seven chronologically and thematically arranged chapters reveal the well-intentioned but paternalistic operation of early disability services. Highly recommended.”—CHOICE

“Integrates disability history and labor history to examine how, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, people with disabilities lost access to paid work and acquired the status of morally questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation.”—Law & Social Inquiry

“Has much to offer historians of labor, disability, poverty, and public policy. By revealing historical construction of disabled people’s exclusion from the paid labor force, Rose encourages scholars to think complexly about the meanings of work, the limits of the status of 'worker,' and the connections between market-based labor, social standing, and citizenship in American history.”—LABOR Review

“Rose’s scholarship in this book is exemplary. The clarity and breadth of her arguments are built on a solid foundation of primary-source material and secondary literature. Will stand as an important milestone in the maturation of disability history as a field and will open up promising new areas for further inquiry.”—American Historical Review

“Well worth reading. . . . Rose’s prodigious research . . .[and] her reminder of how people with disabilities were integrated into early-nineteenth-century America can perhaps help families, employers, and American society reimagine disability and productive citizenship for the future.”—Australasian Journal of American History

“An important contribution to the fields of labor history and disability history.”—Journal of American History

“No Right to Be Idle is a pathbreaking work that rests on prodigious research and penetrating insights. Sarah Rose has produced the first fully historical and vastly important study we have on the social welfare origins of disability as a category for law, policy, and the organization of work.” —Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Rich in historical context, rigorously researched, and powerfully argued, Sarah Rose’s book is a superb social history of disability from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s. Through a series of exquisitely and painstakingly rendered case studies, No Right to Be Idle is an excellent illustration of the many complex relationships among disability, work, productivity, and citizenship.”—Michael Rembis, University at Buffalo