Feeble-Minded (1920 - 1950)

From

1920s

To

1950s

Categories

Term commonly found on child welfare records

Location

Western Australia

Feeble-minded was a term used in the twentieth century to describe people who had intellectual disabilities. The Minister for Public Health in Western Australia defined five classes of 'defectives' in 1929. The third class was feeble-minded, who were 'persons in whose case there exists mental defectiveness not amounting to imbecility, yet so pronounced that they require care, supervision and control for their own protection, or in the case of children, that they, by reason of such defectiveness, appear to be incapable of receiving proper benefit from instruction in ordinary schools' (Hansard, 17 September 1929, p.742).