Rabia Belt: "Outcasts From the Vote: Women Suffrage and Disability Over the Long 19th Century United States"
Drawing upon a diverse array of sources, from visual media to legislative documents, I excavate a deep involvement with mental disability by suffrage activists for the white woman suffrage movement in the long 19th century United States. This connection begins with the white suffrage movement at Seneca Falls, travels throughout the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, and stretches across the United States. Elite white woman suffrage activists employed a variety of tactics that utilized tropes about "lunatics" and "idiots" in a campaign to shore up their own potential enfranchisability.
Rabia Belt is Assistant Professor of Law.