Mrs. Willie Mae Goodman heard many people speak of her daughter’s death. When she was an infant and a toddler, doctors encouraged Mrs. Goodman and her husband to place Marguerite in an institution. Her doctors predicted that Marguerite would not live beyond two years, and they told her parents that they could send her away.
Many major changes in education have come through federal legislation. The GI Bill of 1944 provided support for college tuition for former soldiers, many who would not have been able to afford it otherwise. Title IX of the Civil Rights Act led to the expansion of women’s access to sports in schools.
Marguerite Goodman lived at the Gouverneur Hospital in lower Manhattan. Her mother, Willie Mae Goodman, organized to improve Marguerite’s life at Gouverneur. This article by the New York Daily News identifies the many ways she and other family members of residents worked to change Gouverneur.
As institutions became more widespread, more parents sent their children with intellectual and developmental disabilities away, hoping they would be rehabilitated and come home. Many of them never did. New York built five institutions for Disabled people, starting in 1855 with a state school in Syracuse, and followed by schools in Rome, Newark, and Letchworth Village. The city also operated an “Idiot School” or “Asylum” on Randall’s Island.
Willowbrook opened in 1947. The number of people living at institutions in and around New York City increased in the early twentieth century as physicians frequently told parents of “mentally retarded” children to send them to institutions where they could be rehabilitated. At this time, public schools could still turn away children if they thought they were “uneducable.”1
In the late 1800s through the early 1900s, educators and social reformers created institutions for people they called “idiots,” “feeble minded,” or later, “mentally retarded.”1 They said that these facilities could train children and return them to society as productive citizens, and relieve the few overcrowded and understaffed “special classes” in city schools. State institutions like Letchworth Village were built to take on the responsibility of educating children outside of New York City.
State institutions grew throughout New York State after the founding of the New York Asylum in 1851 and into the mid-20th century. Labeled “inmates,” people with different types of disabilities were often counted and categorized alongside “reformatory” inmates, or delinquent youth, some of whom may have also been disabled. Other classes of inmates included “tuberculosis patients,” “Indian children,” and “veterans and widows of veterans.”
Henry Goddard was a psychologist living and working in New Jersey. He was the head of the Vineland Institute, but also researched and wrote about Disabled people and people labeled as disabled in locations around the country. In this report, he comments on the use of the Binet intelligence test to determine whether “delinquent girls” had the mental capacity to be responsible for their actions, or whether they did not.
