KOGAN-DISSERTATION-2015.Pdf

“EVERY GOOD MAN IS A QUAKER, AND THAT NONE BUT GOOD MEN ARE QUAKERS”: TRANSATLANTIC QUAKER HUMANITARIANS, DISABILITY, AND MARKETING ENLIGHTENED REFORM, 1730-1834 by NATHANIEL SMITH KOGAN Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON December 2015 Copyright © by Nathaniel Smith Kogan 2015 All Rights Reserved ii Acknowledgements I initially began work on my doctorate in 2009 as a way to keep myself out of trouble and intellectually engaged. To those ends, I certainly succeeded! This project has been at times challenging, exhausting, and overwhelming—especially as my wife and I have welcomed two children into our lives and moved 1200 miles from our Texas home since I first began this project. Ultimately, however, it has been fulfilling and I’m thrilled to be able to thank those who have helped it come to fruition. I’m immensely grateful to my committee members, Sarah Rose, John Garrigus, Elisabeth Cawthon, and Michael Goode. I particularly thank Sarah for her patience (especially with Skype) and her constant encouragement of my research. Drs. Garrigus, Cawthon, and Les Riding-In at UT-Arlington all helped secure support for my studies and research travels that have made it possible to complete this degree. Thank you! At my wonderful school community of Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s, I’d like to thank Dr. Fiona Halloran and Dr. Kathryn Taylor for their constant encouragement and support of my research and helping me appreciate the value that this process of dissertating brings not only for ourselves, but more importantly, for our students. I’d like to thank all those who hosted me during my research journeys: Florence and Michael Mini, Marcus and Brenda Webb, and Ben Metcalf and Melissa Garcia. You all helped make my time away from home (and sometimes family) warm and welcoming. Finally, I’d like to thank my wonderful and amazing wife, Anna, whose love and support throughout this marathon project has been unwavering. February 1, 2016 iii Abstract “EVERY GOOD MAN IS A QUAKER, AND THAT NONE BUT GOOD MEN ARE QUAKERS”: TRANSATLATIC QUAKER HUMANITARIANS, DISABILITY, AND MARKETING ENLIGHTENED REFORM, 1730-1834 Nathaniel Smith Kogan, PhD The University of Texas at Arlington, 2015 Supervising Professor: Sarah Rose This dissertation explores how Quaker humanitarians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries actively absorbed and employed emerging Enlightenment discourses about “disability” and human dependency as a means to build support for, fund, and market their reform activities. Beginning in the eighteenth century in their abolitionist advocacy, Quakers harnessed Enlightenment rhetoric about disability and public displays of aberrant bodies and minds in order to raise attention to the plight of various marginalized groups and also to raise funds to support these causes. This emerging concept of disability, which was very individualized, cohered nicely with Quakers’ central theological tenet of the “Inner Light,” which holds that there is that of God in all individuals. Rooted in these earnest religious convictions and their embrace of Enlightenment progress, Quaker humanitarians iv absorbed the dualistic Enlightenment notion that disabilities constituted a marginal form of humanity, but one that an individual could overcome. Methodologically, this dissertation takes a cultural approach by closely examining how Quaker reformers both adopted and adapted an Enlightenment-forged rhetoric of disability to market their reform endeavors, pursue their humanitarian goals, and define their sect as leaders in transatlantic philanthropy. Through this analysis, this dissertation highlights how Quaker reformers embraced an Enlightenment-forged concept of disability that was at once pejorative and celebratory. As philanthropic Friends marketed their own reform institutions and initiatives, they furthered this dualistic notion of disability. Defining institutional success through the medicalized language of “cures” and “restoration,” these philanthropists reinforced Enlightenment hierarchies of disability. As a result, Quaker reform institutions actively sought out those aberrant people who could be “cured” and return to “normal” society, whom they felt constituted a higher form of humanity, while they sought to exclude those whose aberrance was permanent and not “bettered” by medical interventions or education. This dissertation focuses on the ways various Quaker reformers harnessed these ideas about disability to advocate for abolition, create more “humane” insane asylums, and influence the establishment of deaf education in Philadelphia. Finally, this dissertation also uncovers the active role that many people with disabilities played both in the conceptual construction of disability in this era as well as in active resistance to the marginalization or exploitation that many institutional administrators tried to impose on them. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ iii Abstract …………………………………………………………………………..iv List of Illustrations ................................................................................................. ix Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 The Changing Historical Meaning of Disability .................................................9 The Changing History of Friends, their Faith, and their Philanthropy ..............17 Dissertation Structure and Chapter Overview ...................................................21 Chapter 1 The Enlightenment: Intersections between Constructions of Disability and Eighteenth-Century Quakerism .................................................... 27 Sapere Aude!: The Foundations and Emergence of the Enlightenment ............33 Medieval and Early Modern Notions of Disability ...........................................45 Disability in the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment ...............................51 Quakers and the Enlightenment .........................................................................72 Conclusion .........................................................................................................93 Chapter 2 Aberrations in the Body and in the Body Politic: The Eighteenth- Century Life of Benjamin Lay, Disabled Abolitionist .......................................... 96 Benjamin Lay, Barbados, and the Emergence of Anti-Slavery Advocacy ......101 Benjamin Lay, Disability, and Eighteenth Century Antislavery Activism .....109 Benjamin Lay’s Rhetoric of Disability ............................................................119 Eighteenth-Century Visual Representations of Benjamin Lay ........................130 Conclusion .......................................................................................................136 vi Chapter 3 The Strange Career of Benjamin Lay: The Nineteenth-Century Legacy of a Disabled Icon .................................................................................. 139 Presentations of Benjamin Lay’s Strange Body ..............................................144 Presentations of Connections between Lay’s Mind and Body ........................151 Presentations of Lay’s Advocacy as the Outgrowth of his Otherness .............167 Roberts Vaux: Forging and Marketing the Legacy of Benjamin Lay .............171 Benjamin Lay in Contemporary Historiography .............................................184 Conclusion: The Legacy of Benjamin Lay as a Disabled Activist ..................188 Chapter 4 ‘may we all my beloved friend be willing to descend as into the Valley of pleading’: Rhetoric versus Reality at Quaker Insane Asylums in the Atlantic World .................................................................................................... 190 Defining and Marketing Moral Treatment at the Retreat ................................196 Moral Treatment Moves West: The Transatlantic Links between the Retreat and Friends Asylum ........................................................................................ 208 The Persistence of Restraint and Control at the Retreat and Friends Asylum 228 “Patient” Agency and Challenges to Moral Treatment at the Retreat and Friends Asylum ............................................................................................... 236 Conclusion:The Legacy of Marketing “Moral Treatment” in the Transatlantic Quaker World ................................................................................................. 247 Chapter 5 ‘the most useful instruments in dispensing light’: “Overcoming” and Marketing Deaf Education at the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb ............................................................................................................ 253 vii Roberts Vaux: Engaging with Notions of Disability through Philanthropy ....262 The Transatlantic Influences of the PIDD .......................................................267 Quakerism and the Role of Religion at the PIDD ...........................................282 Defining Disability and Marketing Overcoming at the PIDD .........................295 Conclusion .......................................................................................................316 Conclusion .........................................................................................................

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