Newsweek ran an article on “The Homosexual Teacher” in December 1978. At the end of a tumultuous two-year period framed by Anita Bryant's anti-gay campaign in South Florida and John Briggs' proposition to bar gay and lesbian educators from working in California public schools, reporters concluded, “Most homosexual teachers are deeply plagued by job anxiety.” That observation likely came as no surprise.

Due to its ascendancy as the administrative and commercial center of early modern England, London experienced sustained growth in the latter half of the sixteenth century, as waves of rural immigrants sought to enhance their material conditions by tapping into the city's bustling occupational and civic networks. The resultant crowded urban landscape fostered mounting demand for medical services, since injuries and ailments, ranging from consumption to contusions, proliferated within the city's teeming streets and markets. Due to consistently strong patient demand and the conventions of English common law, which stipulated that legal authorization to practice medicine was solely contingent upon patient consent, peddling medical services to the city's ill and infirm became an increasingly appealing—and potentially lucrative—venture. Consequently, London's largely unregulated medical marketplace—characterized by competition for patients, the mounting influence of print culture, and the emergence of small commercial networks—attracted a diverse array of practitioners, including university-educated physicians, who focused on treating ailments of the inner body by prognosticating and prescribing medicine; guild-licensed surgeons, who treated ailments ranging from broken bones to venereal disease through direct manual manipulation of the body; and a medley of specialist and itinerant practitioners, who were neither licensed by city authorities noraffiliated with established livery companies.

“The value of the Art Education becomes more and more apparent as a means of honorable support and of high culture and enjoyment,” stated the catalog of Ingham University in western New York State in 1863. The Art Department there would prepare “pupils for Teachers and Practical Artists.” This statement reveals some of the vocational options for women that were concomitant with the increased popularity of music and art education in the middle decades of the nineteenth century in the United States. Practical vocational concerns, along with notions of refinement and respectable entertainment, all were aspects of the impetus for music and art education. Preparing young women for occupations, whether as teachers of art and music or as commercial artists or musicians, was a particularly prominent component of education for women in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.

This essay is an exploratory history of American educators as viewed through the lens of disability studies. By this I mean that I am looking at the history of school teachers with disability as the primary marker of social relations, in much the same way that I and others have looked at the history of education through the primary lens of race, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, and sexuality. Looking at the history of teachers through the analytic framework of disability studies allows us to see first, how educational systems, practices, values, and professional norms have developed in a way that excludes people with disabilities from educational employment, or assigned them to parallel and marginalized institutions of special education and second, how notions of normality have defined the work and identity of all educators. It is this latter point that is my greatest interest here: how cultural concepts of ability and disability have shaped all educators' occupational identity and experience over time.