The institutional context matters because it is easy, in accounts of Rosemary Kennedy’s life, to treat Saint Coletta simply as the place where she was hidden — a backdrop for the family’s absence rather than a place with its own character and her own life within it. Fifty-six years is a long time. Most of the events that make up a life — the daily meals, the conversations, the weather, the small pleasures and small frustrations — took place at Saint Coletta, in the Kennedy cottage, in the company of the Sisters, within the rhythms of institutional life in Jefferson, Wisconsin.
That life is imperfectly documented and in some respects undocumentable. But it was real, and Rosemary Kennedy was real within it.
The Vocabulary Problem and What It Reveals
The language used to describe Rosemary Kennedy’s condition across the decades of accounts about her life reflects the shifting and often deeply inadequate vocabulary that American society has applied to intellectual disability.
The term “feebleminded” was the dominant medical and legal term of the early twentieth century. It was replaced, gradually, by “mental retardation” — a term that was used in legislation (Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s Saturday Evening Post article used it; JFK’s 1963 legislation used it; the National Association for Retarded Children used it in its name) and in medical and educational contexts through most of the twentieth century. By the 1990s and 2000s, “mental retardation” had itself come to be recognized as stigmatizing, and the preferred term became “intellectual disability” — a term that describes a functional characteristic without the layers of judgment embedded in its predecessors.