Envisioning Disability and Family: Poster Child Imagery and American Postwar Conservatism

This paper examines changes in visual representation and rhetoric in public health education and fundraising in the United States after World War II. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP, now March of Dimes) and the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) used mass media to place new emphasis on the disabled "poster child." A child stepping from a wheelchair--a commonly depicted scene--symbolized a transition from the hospital to the neighborhood, from the realm of science and medicine to the suburban American dream. This presentation will argue that the NFIP’s and MDA’s poster child campaign imagery moved disabled children from medical to community spaces. This representational move expanded the organizations’ pursuit of disease eradication to encompass familial and community spaces as important places of support for those goals at a time when “family values” took on new political weight.

This presentation traces the shifting representations of disabled children in communities (the nuclear family, the neighborhood, and the nation) starting in 1960 with the NFIP’s shift from polio to birth defects as its primary issue and ending in 1980 with the poster child role’s rebranding as “goodwill ambassador.” These images also highlight the complex convergence of class, race, and disability in politically contentious decades that saw the rise of the new right. As debates over family values and women’s rights took center stage, the charities carefully negotiated the ideological divides by circulating increasingly diverse depictions of American families and communities to ensure broadest appeal. The organizations connected themes of respectability, hard work, and the mindful performance of gender and racial norms in their poster child imagery to patriotic sentiments in order to push for continued research into cures for disability, rather than investment into care networks, while promoting the acceptance of physically disabled children and their families within mainstream American values.