I am finishing a dissertation on the way that motherhood and charity produce disabled characters in social settlement literature:

Motherhood, Charity, and Disability in Social Settlement Literature, 1880-1930

Progressive Era (1880-1930) social settlements were nexuses of interaction across class and social disparities. This project examines writings about women in these vibrant and turbulent spaces, because textual assertions about normalcy and belonging were especially relevant in the urban contact zone of the social settlement. This project interprets textual representations of women both as residents of settlements and of the neighborhoods in which settlements were located. I examine texts by Jane Addams, Anzia Yezierska, William Dean Howells, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Elia Peattie, and Sarah Collins Fernandis.

My research investigates how motherhood and charity work as deforming forces in the creation of disabled figures in Progressive Era social settlement literature, including non-fiction texts, popular reform fiction, and autobiographical narratives. Motherhood, as maternal rhetoric and distributed mothering practices, and charity, as an idea and act, are especially pertinent to depictions of disability in settlement literature because disabled figures were commonly portrayed as needy, impoverished, and childlike entities. These dramatis personae, the maternal benefactress and the relief agency, are endemic to the squalid, urban American cityscapes that provide the backdrop for these texts. Moreover in reform fiction the assistance and advocacy of the maternal benefactress is generally received with gratitude by the disabled characters. Yet it is these central symbols of Progressive ideology, the conventional ideas of motherhood and charity that deform and construct the disabled characters in the first place.

However on occasion, as in Jane Addams’s texts, the traditional tropes of motherhood and charity are contested and thus overturn established literary expectations about disability in settlement literature by creating empowered and independent characters with impairments or non-normative identities. These atypical textual representations avoid and in fact reverse the deforming forces of charity and maternalist/paternalist rhetoric and thus do not deform, but attempt to return the character and reader to a time before the hegemony of normalcy.

My research areas include: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Literature, Twentieth Century American Literature, Disability Studies, Gender Studies, American Progressivism, Urbanism and the History of the American City, Science Fiction, Comics Studies, and the Teaching of Writing.

I am a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego, though at the moment I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Arts and Humanities and affiliated faculty with Center for Values in Medicine, Science and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas.

I can be contacted at sabrinastarnaman@gmail.com.