But the family operated within the same cultural assumptions as everyone else. The shame attached to disability in the eugenics era was not limited to lower-income families. The fear that a disabled family member would damage a family’s social standing or undermine its children’s marriage prospects was widespread among middle-class and upper-class American families. The pressure to conceal, to manage, to present a normalized family to the outside world was something the Kennedys felt as acutely as anyone.
Rose Kennedy’s strategy of keeping Rosemary’s differences private — of managing her enrollment in schools that could support her while presenting her publicly as a normal Kennedy daughter — was the strategy of a woman trying to protect her child in a world that had made disability into a source of shame. Whatever mixture of genuine protection and social management drove that strategy, it was not invented by Rose Kennedy. It was the available strategy for a family in her position in that era.
The tragedy is that this strategy, carried to its logical end, led to a situation in which Rosemary’s father felt that managing her had become impossible and that a radical intervention — experimental brain surgery — was preferable to the ongoing challenge of her existence.
What It Meant to Be a Kennedy Daughter
The Kennedy family’s particular dynamic added specific pressure on top of the general cultural pressure around disability. Joe Kennedy had decided, sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, that his family was going to be one of the great American families — not just wealthy, not just prominent, but politically powerful in the way that old WASP families had been powerful, with sons in Congress and possibly the presidency.