Furthermore, the war was of great importance in that it completely altered the demographic of the disabled population in Britain: the returning veterans were fit, enfranchised men, previously comprising the most dependable portion of the citizenry. Indeed, 70% of amputees were less than 30 years of age. This demographic shift served to challenge prevailing conservative and eugenic conceptions of disability as a societal burden, associated with vulnerability and deficiency. In a reversal of previous perceptions, disability, albeit that of the symbolic figure of the ex-serviceman, came to signify the ‘supreme realization of Victorian expectations about manliness’. Losing a limb in warfare problematized the question of breeding for eugenicists, whose theories were prominent at the beginning of the twentieth century. Whilst previously, those with deformities, whom eugenicists perceived to be moral and physical degenerates, were dissuaded from having children to preserve the nation’s ‘racial qualities’, the material and psychological motivations of a ‘land fit for heroes’ heightened the impetus to ‘restore’ disabled veterans. Such men still had the desirable biol
ogical qualities required to enhance Britain’s racial stock, as their physical incapacities evinced strength and heroism, thus their progeny needed to be protected. Indeed, the Eugenics Society implored the state to provide ample financial benefits that would allow disabled ex-servicemen to keep pace with their ‘stay-at-home neighbors’ in the marriage market. Ultimately, as Bourke asserted, it was this change in the constitution of the disabled population ‘from passive to active sufferers that altered the entire language of disablement’. She argues that there was a marked cultural ‘movement from a language of childlike passivity’ associated with disability, citing the example of the Guild of the Brave Poor Things, which changed its name to the Guild of the Handicapped in 1916 to appeal more to wounded soldiers who understandably found the original name to be emasculating. Fundamentally, this constant accentuation of disabled veterans as heroes, with elevated civic worth, rendered conservative notions of disablement insupportable, thereby setting off the process of changing well-established public attitudes toward and culture’s treatment of physical disability.