Since your PhD research, you’ve focused on feminist movements and women’s networks, particularly in German-speaking Europe around 1900. Could you outline how activists established and maintained these networks, also across national borders, and why the housing question was particularly important to feminist movements at the time?
My research spans the period from the 1870s to the 1920s. This was a time when the so-called 'women's question’ was widely debated in many European societies, the women's movement emerged as a significant social force, and feminist activists established several significant practises and strategies that proved crucial for transnational feminist networks at the time. Most importantly, they travelled extensively.
They travelled for large international conferences that regularly took place in different European capitals, for lecture tours, or what they called propaganda tours. Very often, during these trips, these activists were hosted privately by other feminist activists. Alongside strategies such as publishing and maintaining correspondence through letters, travelling and hosting became one of the most effective strategies for women activists to promote and spread their own causes. These practices helped to forge or intensify relationships, to overcome distance, and to foster a sense of belonging. A sense of belonging that extended to a homosocial lifeworld, as many activists lived their lives almost exclusively among women.
For many movements’ activists, political involvement went hand in hand with the decision not to marry and instead to live in alternative relationship models: They might have lived in women’s homes, in so-called ladies’ apartments, or as a couple together with another activist. Claiming the right to remain single was closely linked to the possibility of independent employment. In this housing question, the demand for economic security converged with the right to choose a life outside marriage.
All these practices show how deeply political, professional, and private interactions were intertwined in feminist circles. So, when it comes to examining the letters exchanged among feminist activists, we often find how political strategies, personal gossip, and expressions of friendship, love, and desire appear side by side. This makes them an incredibly interesting source for historians.
As a Max Weber Fellow, you work on the history of disability rights movements in Central Europe since the 1970s with a special interest in the experiences and agency of women with disabilities. On the level of language, these women referred to themselves as Krüppelfrauen ("crippled women"). What are the origins and political significance of this term, and what is its connection to contemporary crip theory?
After finishing my PhD, when I was searching for a new project, I became really interested in the concept of intersectionality and how to apply it in historical research. When reading more recent texts on it, I noticed that disability often appeared at the bottom of the list of categories or was sometimes not mentioned at all. I was really wondering why that was. I started reading about the disability rights movement and because of my long-standing interest in gender history, I was very quickly also drawn to the question: How did women with disabilities navigate their identities and how did they deal with all the shapes of marginalisation they experienced?
People with disabilities have used various forms of self-description in different historical moments. For parts of the disability rights movement in Germany and Austria in the early 1980s, the negative Krüppelfrauen, from Krüppel ("cripple"), became significant as a political self-designation. Using expressions like Krüppelfrauen - crippled women - meant reclaiming and politicising a term originally meant to harm, similar to how terms such as lesbian, gay, or queer have been reclaimed. These activists adopted Krüppel in an emancipatory way to strip it of its derogatory power.
Crip theory, a strand within critical disability studies, addresses the complex mechanisms of power and normalisation in societies, challenges binary systems and, much like queer theory, engages in the active reclamation of language, reflected in the use of crip. Crip theory is concerned with how the normative quality of ability intersects with the normativity that is brought about by the categories of gender and sexuality. All these categories are embedded in a binary system that creates a certain norm by excluding other positions, subjectivities, and identities. Crip theory focuses on the exact processes by which certain bodies or subjects are deemed normal, while others are perceived as deviant, marginal, or pathological. It therefore contests individualistic and medical perceptions of disability, by questioning the idea that disability represents a lack or is in need of correction.
How did specific events and political actions, such as the Krüppel Tribunal, shape the visibility and rights of women with disabilities in Germany and beyond?
The years 1980/81 have been described as decisive for the disability rights movement, both by contemporary witnesses and in research. During this period, when the United Nations proclaimed the “International Year of Disabled Persons”, groups began to adopt more radical approaches than earlier interest groups; they argued vehemently against claims of normalisation and often rejected cooperation with people without disabilities. In spectacular events such as the ‘Cripple Tribunal’ in Dortmund, where hundreds of people gathered, activists politicised the everyday lives of disabled people, and demanded self-determination rather than segregation and care. As can be seen in photographs, the activists themselves visibly claimed space and politicised what it meant to be disabled in German society. The tribunal not only attracted widespread attention but also functioned as a platform to hold the state accountable for violations of human rights. Moreover, the influence of the tribunal extended beyond Germany, resonating in other national contexts and inspiring further activism.
This period also saw a landmark event specifically for women with disabilities, who publicly addressed critical issues such as violence against women with disabilities, particularly sexualised violence, for the first time. This event was not only a moment of visibility but also a milestone in linking the struggles of women with disabilities to other social movements of the 1980s. It highlighted the necessity of approaches that recognise how gender, disability, and other axes of marginalisation intersect in shaping experiences and activist strategies.
In this sense, the Krüppel Tribunal and related initiatives exemplify how individual events, collective action, and strategic visibility contributed to redefining disability as a political and social category, while also challenging existing power structures within both feminist and disability movements.
When did disability history emerge as a research field and what major milestones have shaped its development? How has this field contributed to shifting debates around feminism, anti-ableism, and self-representation?
Disability history emerged in the 1980s as a subfield of disability studies, though it has not gained as much prominence as fields such as gender or queer studies. For decades, perceptions of disability were shaped by the medical or individualistic model, which defined disability according to biomedical or genetic criteria, in contrast to supposedly healthy and functioning bodies. Building on the disability rights movement, the social model of disability developed from the 1970s onward. This model argues that people are more disabled by the societies they live in than by their bodies, minds, or diagnoses. So here, disability is perceived as being embedded within a system of powerful societal asymmetries that grant able-bodied people access to spaces, careers, education, and life opportunities, while denying these to disabled people.
The social model has also been essential for disability history, allowing historians to situate individual experiences within broader social contexts and to examine repressive norms and power structures. In this sense, disability history contributes significantly to debates around anti-ableism and self-representation. Focusing on women with disabilities also allows us to complicate the established narratives of feminist movements - for example, by examining how feminist groups dealt with difference or how they approached reproductive technologies and abortion.
Could you provide an example of how disability studies and gender studies intersect within academic research? In what ways can academic research contribute to a more just and inclusive society and elevate marginalised voices?
In all these fields, academic inquiry was primarily driven by social movements. Activists were often the first producers of knowledge – they wrote, organised events, and formulated analyses of patriarchy, queer experience, ableism, and more, from the perspective of those directly affected. This close connection to activism is also one reason why these fields are frequently questioned as not scientific or not legitimate. Yet I believe this connection is precisely their strength: They maintain a commitment to social justice, human rights, and critical reflection on the role of experts, participatory methods, and how to involve activist perspectives. And this is also closely linked to the question of how academic research can contribute to a more just and inclusive society and elevate marginalised voices.
I think that my research on marginalised subjects, social movements, and their struggles has taught me that we can’t be neutral as academics. Without critically examining power and making space for voices and perspectives that have been deemed irrelevant, we risk reproducing the exact power relations in our research that we already see in society. As a historian working on disability rights, on feminist and queer movements, this means that I need to reflect on my positionality and on epistemic authority: I have to ask myself who is given access to knowledge, whose stories are deemed worthy to end up in an archive, and last but not least, how can I – as a scholar – make my research accessible to the communities I address. So, in that sense, doing research on marginalised groups comes with a certain responsibility, and neutrality is not an option.
Elisa Heinrich is a historian working at the intersection of gender history, queer history and disability studies. Before joining the EUI as a Max Weber Fellow, she was visiting professor for queer history and biographical studies at Vienna University and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck. She is the author of a book on homosexuality and friendship in Germany’s first women’s movement, and a member of the DFG-funded research network ‘Queer contemporary history in German-speaking Europe,’ which aims to introduce a general audience to queer history.
In her second year as a Max Weber Fellow, Elisa will continue working on her new research project on disability rights activism, knowledge practices, and self-representation of people with disabilities in Central Europe from the 1970s to 1990s.