“God wanted me to have another chance”: American Catholic Women, Disability, and Vocation in Polio Memoirs

Polio memoirs reflect the lived religious experiences of those who survived the disease in the mid-twentieth century. These autobiographical writings draw connections between theodicy, gender, profession, and disability. American Catholic women who survived polio and who wrote about it often viewed their suffering in relationship to a divine calling and frequently connected their vocational choices to the reason for their disability. In part because Catholic women’s religious-cultural contexts defined appropriate career pursuits by prizing service careers and the work of vowed religious, American Catholic women polio survivors entered helping professions, including special education and rehabilitative therapy careers, at higher rates than their male counterparts or non-Catholic women. American Catholic polio survivors and the cultural-religious milieu in which they lived offered opportunities to cultivate understandings of suffering, disability, and service—and new ways of narrating these understandings.