From “Blind Susan” to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl: How Mary L. Day Disabled Domesticity

Abstract

This chapter examines Mary L. Day’s memoir Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl (1859) as evidence of the domestic happiness of blind people in the face of a prejudice-ridden society and as a case study in both childhood studies and disability studies. The chapter places Day’s memoir in the context of the rise of new ideas about the normative development of children, the maternal care that it allegedly required, and women’s charitable activism outside the home, ideas that made “childhood” achievable only by able-bodied, middle-class children, attendees of new public schools, and consumers of a new children’s literature. The prejudice that Day faced suggests the ways that the stigmatization of blind people in nineteenth century America was, in part, an effect of new civic and domestic ideals disseminated by writers based in the East. Day’s account of her life in the West, her serial adoption after her mother’s death, and her independence and wide travels starkly belie the sentimental stories of tragic blind girls made omnipresent by children’s magazines and literature.