"Disabled" families? The distribution of tasks and roles in the everday life of families with disabled members in West Germany from 1945 to the 1980s

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Gabriele Lingelbach
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 401611833

The recent history of families with members with disabilities in West Germany has not been yet analyzed. To fill this gap of research and to determine the specifics of family constellations affected by disability, findings of three historical subdisciplines will be heuristically used: disability history, family history, and care history. The project focusses on the everyday life of 'disabled' families by analyzing which roles and tasks in the fields of care and household routines each family member had to fulfill. Special attention will be given to the concerning processes of bargaining between the disabled and abled family members. The project argues on the assumption that the affected families were confronted with specific tasks and that the members had to fulfill specific roles because they had to cope with obstacles and social discrimination generated by the disability of one of their relatives. In this context conflicts, hierarchies of power between family members, and the construction of identities are of special importance. At the same time, changes over time will be analyzed by identifying social developments that influenced the everyday life of ‘disabled’ families: The project asks, whether occurring changes of conceptions and structures of families, the change of gender roles, innovations in policy areas like social, family and rehabilitation policies as well as changes concerning stereotypes about disabled persons affected families with disabled members and led to rearrangements concerning the roles and tasks everyone had to fulfill. Thus, one of the main postulations of disability historians, namely to conceive disabled persons and their relatives not as objects but subjects of their own history, will be met.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants