In this image: Indistinct photo from a 1902 newspaper, showing an adult white woman, light hair pulled back, wearing high-collar dark top.

May Darrach is very possibly the single most important person in the history of the American disability rights movement. Yet she is completely forgotten.

Darrach was born in 1869, in New Jersey. At less than three years old she was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis, and was unable to walk unaided until she was thirteen years old.

Darrach conducted the first survey of disability in the general population, and established the nation’s first educational programs for children with disabilities. She raised an endowment sufficient to found the Darrach Settlement Home for Crippled Children on West 69th Street, a twenty-bed combination school and shelter. In her spare time, she went to medical school and became a physician.

Darrach was disabled, yet she was far too formidable to be overlooked. A unique figure in the United States, Darrach was the first disability activist.

She lectured extensively on the subject of childhood disability, and she pushed and she prodded—and she must have been very, very good, because under her influence new charitable efforts arose in increasing numbers--the Association for the Aid of Crippled Children, the Guild for Crippled Children, the East Side Free School, and many more, all built on the model of privately-funded philanthropy led by small groups of elite college educated Protestant women--an entire movement, in fact, targeted to disability in the general population, the first of its kind in the nation’s history. A number of these organizations survive to this day, and since many of our movement’s leaders grew up under their influence, it is fair to say that the consequences of Darrach’s work continue right down to the present.

To make all this happen, Darrach pushed herself unceasingly--past the point of no return. In 1910 her health broke down, and she was forced to retire. She passed away a few years later, at the age of forty nine.

Over her twenty-year career Darrach achieved success that surpassed anything she might have reasonably expected. Yet she was often overlooked or minimized, even then. More than one contemporary telling of the rise of the children with disabilities’ charity movement states that it was “begun by a woman who was herself a cripple,” but neglects to identify who that person was, or recount any portion of her remarkable story.

I am pleased and proud to bring May Darrach out of historical oblivion.

by Warren Shaw