Rosemary Kennedy’s case does not fit cleanly into this pattern — her intellectual disability was the presenting issue, not her gender — but the gendered dimension of how behavioral differences were treated in the mid-twentieth century is part of the same cultural context that shaped her situation. In a world where women’s emotional and behavioral norms were policed with particular intensity, a young woman who was angry, who left supervised settings without permission, who pursued her own social life in ways her family found difficult to manage, was positioned as a problem to be solved.
The Catholic Context
The Kennedy family’s devout Catholicism shaped their experience of Rosemary’s situation in ways that are not always made explicit in accounts of her life.
The Catholic Church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life, on the dignity of every person created in God’s image, would seem to argue directly against the kind of custodial warehousing that was the alternative to special schools and private care for people with intellectual disabilities. The Kennedys’ choice to keep Rosemary in family life and private educational settings, rather than placing her in a state institution, was consistent with a Catholic understanding of family obligation.
Archbishop Richard Cushing’s recommendation of Saint Coletta as a placement for Rosemary is part of this context. Saint Coletta was a Catholic institution run by a religious order, operating within a framework of care that emphasized the spiritual dignity of people with intellectual disabilities. The choice to place Rosemary there, rather than in a secular institution, reflected both the family’s Catholicism and their assessment of where she would be best cared for.