Introduction: Disability and Family Care in Modern European History

Abstract

How to organize domestic care for relatives living with a disability and elderly family members is a major challenge for individual households, as it is for all European societies. Taking up current debates on the future of family care work, this special issue offers historical perspectives on family care for people with disabilities. It investigates the relationship between disability welfare and family dynamics in modern European history. By bringing together case studies from the 19th and 20th centuries and from Eastern and Western European states, the special issue offers a panorama of regional processes of negotiating intrafamilial gender roles, relationships between private care and public welfare, and discourses on disabilities.