ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how both world wars and the development of the postwar Welfare State shaped government policies and provisions for disabled people. It considers how the emergence of the disability rights movement changed attitudes towards disability, emphasizing the barriers that prevented people from participating equally in society. Whether the impairment underpinning the disability was inborn or developed following accident or illness, disability was understood as a medical matter: doctors could identify the cause of the disability and could offer disabled people some interventions to ameliorate their impairments and enhance their capacity. She argued that medical historians, while alert to misogyny and racism in medical practice, overlooked the structural oppression of disabled people. Yet while the acts that constituted the Welfare State provided some incremental gains for disabled people and implemented specific provisions for people disabled through industrial work and wartime service, they continued to mark disabled people out as second-class citizens.
