“They Do Need You, Don’t They?”: Disability, Gender, and Care Work in World War I Conscription Dramas

This article analyses two World War I–era political dramas that depict civilian disability in a domestic setting, demonstrating how “everyday” disability was incorporated into arguments about the United States’ and individual families’ participation in the war. Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Mine Eyes Have Seen, an anti-lynching play published in The Crisis magazine in April 1918, and Sada Cowan’s The State Forbids, a pro–birth control play first performed in 1916 in Brooklyn, both depict the same moment in war-time family life: the receipt of a draft notice. Draftees’ decisions in both plays about whether to obey their draft notices are complicated by the presence of disabled siblings for whom they feel responsible. While these plays illuminate the influence of eugenics discourse on WWI-era representations of disability, they also imagine possibilities of solidarity and community based in the lived experiences of families who navigate war-time citizenship from positions of vulnerability and outsidership.