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The wheelchair – new symbol of freedom

Posted on 18 May 2004

For millions of disabled people around the world the modern wheelchair has been one of the most important technological innovations of the 20th century.

Over the last 100 years, the wheelchair has been transformed from an awkward, heavy machine designed principally to transport people from one place to another into a powerful ‘mobility tool’ used in dancing, playing rugby, and by athletes in the Paralympic Games.

Now academics at the University of York have won a £160,350 grant from the Economic and Social Research Council to look at the social history and physical development of wheelchairs, and the medical and political processes behind those factors.

Dr Brian Woods of the University of York Department of Sociology, and Dr Nick Watson and Professor Donald McKenzie, both of the University of Edinburgh, have traced the parallels between the wheelchair's technological transformation which gives today's users far more freedom and mobility, and the general move in society toward greater social inclusion and independence for disabled people.

Dr Woods, who is based in the Science and Technology Studies Unit, said:

"The heavy, cumbersome machines that dominated the first half of the 20th century reinforced the notion that disabled people were ill, passive, dependent and 'patients'. Certainly, the implicit design assumption was that the user would be housebound or permanently institutionalised. Medical and rehabilitation thinking also turned wheelchairs into a symbol of failure. Wheelchair use symbolised either medicine's failure to find a cure or that the user had given up on rehabilitation."

Progress in wheelchair design – lightweight, folding and electrically powered – together with medical and rehabilitation advances, and the increased use of cars, helped wheelchair users gain greater independence, and live and find work within their own communities.

"This mobilised disabled people politically as well as physically," Dr Woods added, "and led to changes in employment practices, transport and access to buildings, and, importantly, transformed notions of independence for disabled people.

"Wheelchair users were also important innovators – the ultra-lightweight designs we see today, for example, derived their inspiration from wheelchair sports. Wheelchair athletes had tinkered with the technology to improve their performance.

"This tinkering not only reshaped the technology; it also politicised wheelchair users and challenged the concept of disabled people as passive or ill, and instilled the idea that they are active members of society."