What is certain is that by age two, Rosemary was showing delays that her parents noticed. She was slower to sit up, to crawl, and to walk than her older brothers Joe Jr. and Jack had been. As she grew into school age, the gap between her development and theirs became more visible. She struggled to learn to read and write. She was held back in grades. Teachers and physicians gave her parents a variety of diagnoses over the years — terms that reflected the limited and often cruel medical vocabulary of the early twentieth century, including “mental retardation,” described by some sources as the working designation.
Rose Kennedy noticed. Rose Kennedy worried. And Rose Kennedy, by most accounts, did what the social conventions of her class and time pushed her to do: she kept the worry largely private.
Growing Up Kennedy, With a Difference
The world that Rosemary Kennedy grew up in had little patience for disability that could not be hidden. The eugenics movement, which held that heritable characteristics including supposed mental weakness were threats to the social order, was not a fringe position in early twentieth-century America. It was taught in universities and popularized in magazines. More than thirty states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws for people deemed “feebleminded” by the state. The Supreme Court had upheld such laws in 1927, in Buck v. Bell, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Institutions for people with intellectual disabilities existed throughout the country, but their conditions ranged from merely inadequate to actively abusive. Parents who could afford alternatives tended to seek them, both out of genuine love for their children and out of a well-founded fear of what institutional care might mean. The Kennedys were wealthy. They had options. They used them.