The author offers a sweeping examination of disability identity, tracing its history and parsing the shifting forces that have shaped individual and societal understandings of ability and impairment across time. The author focuses on the relationship between societal views and the self-conceptions of people with mental and physical impairments. The author also illuminates the impact of the disability rights movement, life-course dynamics, and race and gender in creating a diversity of disability identities. Her seminal work reveals the remarkable resilience of individuals in the face of profound social and material barriers, at the same time that it enhances our understanding of the construction and experience of "difference" in our changing society.