All disabled people have the right to full participation in political and public life (CRPD Article 29) and the right to participate in cultural life, recreation, and sport (Article 30). Before the modern disability rights era, disabled people around the world built communities, organizations, schools, mutual aid networks, and resistance strategies that laid the foundation for later movements. This page centers disabled people's self-organization and draws on disabled historians, archival research, and survivor accounts.
Understanding early disability movements matters because disabled people have always organized. These early movements were diverse, often informal, and shaped by race, class, gender, colonialism, and war. They were early expressions of disability identity, culture, and collective political power that made later victories possible.
Between 1800 and 1960, disabled people organized through:
From the early 1800s, Deaf educators and students built powerful networks through Deaf residential schools, sign language instruction, Deaf-led teaching, and international exchanges.
Deaf communities formed some of the earliest disability-led political and cultural movements.
By the mid-1800s, Deaf associations emerged in Europe and North America, including national associations, Deaf clubs, literary societies, and sports leagues.
These groups defended sign languages, supported employment efforts, and offered community life separate from hearing control.
The 1880 Milan Conference imposed oralism—the banning of sign languages—in many countries. Deaf communities resisted through underground signing, teacher training, international networking, and advocacy within schools.
This resistance laid the foundation for modern Deaf rights movements.
Blind people organized around accessible education, employment, publishing, and community life. Schools for the blind often became centers of resistance rather than compliance.
Louis Braille's system (1824) was initially resisted by institutions but championed by blind students. Braille became a literacy revolution, a tool for independence, the foundation for blind activism, and a global standard.
In many countries, blind people created workshops, cooperatives, musicians' unions, massage guilds, and braille printing collectives. These organizations challenged assumptions of unemployability and built economic autonomy.
Although formal psychiatric survivor movements emerged later (1960s onward), earlier forms of resistance appeared throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The "mental hygiene" movement of the early 20th century promoted prevention through surveillance, institutionalization, eugenics, and moral regulation.
In contrast, survivor narratives emphasized abuse and coercion, community alternatives, and the harms of confinement. These tensions shaped future deinstitutionalization.
Large-scale wars created major veteran populations, including disabled veterans who influenced social welfare systems.
Veterans often received better treatment than civilians, reinforcing a hierarchy between "deserving" disabled people (veterans) and "undeserving" disabled people (poor, racialized, institutionalized).
Veteran organizing helped build early accessibility systems but also sometimes excluded civilians with disabilities.
Injured workers, miners, and factory laborers formed organizations to demand compensation, medical care, safety standards, and reduced working hours.
Workplace disability became a key political issue in countries such as Germany, Britain, United States, Japan, and South Africa.
Some unions excluded disabled people, seeing them as competition. Others included disabled workers and led safety movements, influencing labor law globally.
Disabled people of color organized within their own communities and alongside racial justice movements.
These networks often operated outside state systems and laid groundwork for disability justice frameworks.
Even before large-scale disability rights movements emerged, disabled people and families resisted forced sterilization, family separation, institutionalization, eugenic marriage bans, and immigration exclusions.
Survivors and families helped expose abusive institutions and unjust sterilization laws, setting up mid-century reform and later rights movements.
By the mid-20th century, several forces converged to create the conditions for modern disability rights:
These developments set the stage for the Independent Living Movement, Deinstitutionalization, and the global disability rights revolution.
This page centers disabled people's expertise and is informed by disabled-led organizing globally. For questions or to suggest additions, see How to Contribute.