Women's Suffrage & Disability Rights

The Women's Suffrage Movement occurred contemporaneously with the Anti-Slavery Movement, and it ended up achieving its goals much later due to the Civil War which ended up highlighting the racial issues. The Disability Rights Movement seems to be in a similar situation where it currently is picking up speed (and has been for probably thirty years) but also is pushed into the background by other larger campaigns like the Gay Marriage issue. Like the Woman's Suffrage Movement, the Disability Rights Movement "asserts that people with disabilities are human beings with inalienable rights and that these rights can only be secured through collective political action" (The Regents of the University of California). Like women, but probably to an even higher scale, people with disabilities have been denied rights throughout our country's history; they were defined as objects and too often experienced abuse through incarceration, nursing homes, and state institutions. Laws to sterilize person with disabilities against their will and ban children with disabilities from public schools were the majority and only after the Suffrage and Civil Rights Movements did the activism occur for this specific construction of difference. Also, like Suffrage (and Civil Rights), people involved in the Disability Rights Movement have intersections of identity that can include ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender minorities, so the movement itself needs to be diverse. Beginning in the late 1960's the Disability Rights Movement has achieved plenty- IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) that has been edited a few times, and the Americans with Disabilities act in 1990.

http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/drilm/introduction.html