The relationship between what we are and what we do has fascinated human beings for a long time. For some people, one of the two (usually being) has primacy over the other (usually doing). Beginning with Plato’s break between the ideal and the material and Aristotle’s divide between being and doing, dualism has shaped much of Western philosophy. For others, our ever-forming being is a product of our doing. Doing, of course, can be routinized or it can be unpredictable, odd, uncommon, exciting. In any case, it is out of our doing that being is created and, certainly, our being shapes what we do, or what other people have us do. In other words, dualism is challenged.

Sarah Rose’s superb book, No Right to Be Idle, is a detailed history of the changes in North American authorities’ views of what disabled people are and what they do, can do, should do, and cannot do. Sometimes people have called these doings education or learning, other times work or labor, and still other times inactivity or idleness. Rose’s history focuses primarily on what today we call intellectual disability, but formerly we labeled idiocy, imbecility, feeblemindedness, mental defectiveness, mental deficiency, and mental retardation. Besides this history, Rose ends her book with a chapter that considers the linkage between veterans’ disabilities, vocational rehabilitation, and work.

In the mid-1840s, North Americans began to learn about the efforts of Édouard Séguin in Paris to educate “idiots.” Before this time, no American educator seriously considered it possible to educate intellectually disabled people. Taken by the success of Séguin’s method of “physiological education”—a method grounded in the development of the senses—Americans like Hervey B. Wilbur and Samuel G. Howe opened schools for the education of “idiots.” Rose argues that these schools stressed academic and vocational education with the goal of returning students to their local communities to become productive workers and citizens. For about thirty years, from the late 1840s until the late 1870s, Rose claims that families had far more authority over the lives of these students than did school authorities. For this reason, students visited home during school holidays and returned home after their completed education to work on a family farm or for a small local business.

Beginning even before the 1870s, this view of work and productivity began to change. As this change happened, the small “idiot” schools began to grow into large, self-contained institutions, and new facilities that developed around the nation beginning in the 1870s began as large enterprises. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, education, work, and productive citizenship shifted from communities to the institutions themselves. As such, institutional authorities no longer viewed their students (now likely called inmates) as fit for community productivity. They were “citizens” of the institution destined to work in the institution itself. That work might be on the institution’s farm; in its wards, where higher-functioning inmates would care for lower-functioning inmates; or other odd jobs at the institution.

Rose argues that this change in the locus of productivity—from the community to the institution—was the result of factors endemic to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. First, several severe economic downturns over these decades made it increasingly difficult for families and communities to receive educated intellectually disabled people back into their home communities. The difficulty was the result of the economic distress of the period. It was simply easier for “feebleminded” inmates to stay at the facility, where their unpaid labor proved a cost benefit to the institution. Second, the post–Civil War shift from the United States as a predominately rural nation to one that was becoming ever more urban meant that families had fewer options for finding work for their disabled relatives. Wage-labor in cities made such reception difficult for families. Finally, the advent of social Darwinism and, a bit later, the eugenics movement painted a picture of the “feebleminded” as a, and eventually the, principal source of many social problems—petty thievery, out-of-wedlock births, drunkenness, and so forth. No longer were intellectually disabled people the focus of education leading to community productivity; they were now a social menace that should be permanently housed in large institutions to protect the community from their “fallen” ways. The promise of education and productivity in communities in the 1840s and 1850s had given way to a social threat solved only by institutional labor and restraint from the communities after the late 1870s.

In her final chapter, Rose moves from a consideration of intellectual disability to vocational rehabilitation for disabled veterans in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. She shows that vocational rehabilitation impeded the reintegration of disabled veterans into society by, among other things, bureaucratic entanglement, medicalizing their disabilities, and programs like Goodwill that did not include productive work. Likewise, some disabled veterans found themselves ineligible for services or had their claims denied because their injuries were not considered serious enough. She notes that even with the progressive views and policies of industrialists like Henry Ford, many disabled veterans found government policies impeded their ability to return to productive citizenship.

Sarah Rose’s No Right to Be Idle is an important addition to the history of disabilities. Her theoretical grounding is sound, and her development of numerous case examples is always pertinent. In short, she has created a authoritative work—one that should be read by historians, sociologists, policy makers, economists, and students of disability studies.