Yes, I know ‘the disabled’ is a loaded term. That’s why I used it.
Last week, I read Disability (Key Concepts) by Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer, a very quick and very good survey of current disability theory. Reading this book, along with Paul K. Longmore’s Why I Burned My Book And Other Essays on Disability, is just the start of my exploration into the field to disability studies. Still, in a chapter entitled “Culture, Media and Representation”, Barnes and Mercer provide one of the best explanations for why illness and disability is so stigmatized that I’ve ever heard.
Quoting feminist Jenny Morris, Barnes and Mercer write:
Most typically, then, Western cultures identify and mark out certain people as ‘different’ or ‘Other’ – particularly those perceived as having flawed or ugly bodies.
Our disability frightens people. They don’t want to think that is something which could happen to them. So we become separated from our common humanity, treated as fundamentally different and alien. Having put up clear barriers between us and them, non- disabled people further they hide their fear and discomfort by turning us into objects of pity, comforting themselves by their own kindness and generosity. (Morris 1991: 192)
Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?
Works Cited
Barnes, C. and Mercer, G. 2003: Disability. Cambridge: Polity Press. 92
Morris, J. 1991: Pride Against Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability. London: Women’s Press.
In addition to Jews, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals and transsexuals, the Nazis also persecuted people with disabilities. In 1933, Adolf Hitler enacted the Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases, which was intended to eliminate “the unfit” from the German race. This law called for the sterilization of all persons with possibly hereditary conditions including mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. Within a few years, the Third Reich decided that forced sterilization was not enough to get rid of their “biological enemies”. Hence, the T-4 Euthanasia Program was enacted, in which people with disabilities and mental illness were systematically murdered.
Helene Melanie Lebel was one of those people.
Helene was born on September 15, 1911, in Vienna, Austria, to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, who later died in World War I. At 19 years old, Helene began showing signs of schizophrenia. By 1935, her symptoms worsened and she was admitted to Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital in Vienna.
In 1938, the Germans annexed Austria to Germany. Two years later, Helene was still being held at Steinhof even though her condition had improved. Although her family was led to believe she would soon be released, the Nazis had lied:
In fact, Helene was transferred to a converted prison in Brandenburg, Germany, where she was undressed, subjected to a physical examination, and then led into a shower room.
Helene was one of 9,772 persons gassed that year in the Brandenburg “Euthanasia” center. She was officially listed as dying in her room of “acute schizophrenic excitement.
It is estimated that 270,000 people with disabilities died during the 1930s and 1940s at the hands of the Nazi regime. (1)
Read more about Helene Melanie Lebel’s life and death or click on the links above.
Additional Works Cited (But Not Linked To Above) Barnes, C. and Mercer, G. 2003: Disability. Cambridge: Polity Press. 32-33
Earlier today, the Senate HELP (Health Education Labor Pension) committee held a hearing on the vital need to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. The committee’s ranking member, Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) proclaimed in his opening remarks:
A study released last year found that if you factor in observable choices such as part time work, seniority and occupational choice, the pay gap stands between 5 to 7 percent. I believe the best way to address that gap is by encouraging women to enter higher earning fields.
The career choices we all make impact our earnings, and data shows that women are more likely to select fields that pay less. There are many reasons one might make such a choice, including schedule flexibility, job security and the quality of fringe benefits such as health, retirement and childcare. I, for one, would never question the logic of making such a tradeoff. In fact, economists have noted that the current economic downturn has had a harsher effect in traditionally male occupations and the unemployment rate for men has been a full 2 percentage points above that for women throughout the recession.
Yet, to the extent that women may not enter traditionally male fields precisely because they have been traditionally male, they may not be earning to their full potential.
In other words, there really isn’t a wage gap and, if there is, it’s women’s own fault because we have chosen the wrong careers, opted to work part-time or flexible schedules, or had the audacity to take advantage of our well-earned employee benefits. What was the most incredible about Sen. Enzi’s statement that if women just made different career choices they could make as much money as men. While he backed up his words with a concrete plan of action to help more women get job training for predominately male-dominated fields, Sen. Enzi is mistaken if he thinks it is that simple.
Today, in 2010, a woman can get training and become an on-the-road (OTR) truck driver, welder or electrical engineer. However, her grandmother could not have tried to get a job at a construction site in 1920. She would have been laughed at and told to go work at a diner, where she would have earned a tiny fraction of the construction worker’s wages. Likewise, a woman in the 1950s could not have gotten a job as a plumber. She, too, would have been laughed at and told to go a clerk in a grocery store. Even today, there are countless families in which the husband works in construction, manufacturing, plumbing, engineering, medicine, information technology, education (and on and on and on) and the wife works at Wal-Mart. It happens every single day.
Both the husband and wife work 40 hours a week (or more). They both work hard at their jobs. One just happens to earn a heck of a lot more money.
That, my friends, is what you call a wage gap. It hurts real women, men and families – even in Wyoming, Sen. Enzi.
Alicia Alonso is a Cuban prima ballerina and choreographer, best known for her portrayals of Gisele and Carmen. She was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1921 and began dancing at an early age, first in Havana at the Ballet School of the Pro-Art Musical Society in 1931. After marrying Fernando Alonso, they moved to New York City where Alicia studied with Anatole Vilzak and Ludmilla Shollar at the School of American Ballet. During this time, she also studied with Vera Volkova in London.
In 1938, Alonso made her Broadway debut in the musicals Great Lady in 1938 and Stars in Your Eyes in 1939. Early in her career, probably about the time, Alonso began experiencing problems with her vision and became partially blind. She continued to dance, by adapting to her impairment:
Her partners always had to be in the exact place she expected them to be, and she used lights in different parts of the stage to guide her. Her handicap was totally unnoticed by the audiences.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Alonso danced in New York, London, Paris, Havana, Russia and Monte Carlo. She is most famous for her iconic portrayal of Giselle in 1943.
Alonso founded the Alicia Alonso Ballet in 1948 in Havana which later became the Cuban National Ballet. After Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, Alonso returned to Cuba permanently and became director of the Cuban National Ballet, a position she holds to this day.
Watch Alicia Alonso performing Giselle with Vladimir Vasiliev and Ballet Nacional de Cuba (1981?)
Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in 1819 in Dorchester County, Maryland. When she was six years old, she was sent to work; first as a weaver, then as a house slave. Seven years later, Tubman was sent to work in the fields.
Tubman had always subjected to whippings and beatings, but at age 12, she suffered an injury that would affect her for the rest of her life. Tubman was defending another slave who was attempting to escape when a white overseer struck her in the head with a 2 pound weight. Most biographical accounts mention the attack, saying something similar to this:
She never fully recovered from the blow, which subjected her to spells in which she would fall into a deep sleep
In other words, Tubman had epilepsy, an extremely stigmatizing and potentially disabling condition.
Harriet Tubman grew up to be one of famous “conductors” of the Underground Railroad. She escaped from slavery in 1849 and made her way to Philadelphia. From 1850 to 1860, she made 19 trips into the South and helped over 300 slaves reach freedom in the North.
Learn more about Harriet Tubman:
Harriet Tubman: African American History of Western New York
Since today, March 3, is “Spread the Word to End the ‘r’ Word Day”, it is appropriate to honor Rosemary Kennedy, the third child and eldest daughter of Rose and Joseph Kennedy, who lived with intellectual disabilities (mental retardation). Most people credit Rosemary with having inspired her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver to start the Special Olympics, which has impacted the lives of millions of people with disabilities.
Rather than attempt to write my own mini-biography of Rosemary Kennedy, I’ll use the words the Kennedy family has chosen to remember her by:
Rosemary Kennedy, born Rose Marie Kennedy on September 13, 1918, was the third child and eldest daughter of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. She was slower to crawl, slower to walk and to speak than her brothers, and she experienced learning difficulties when she reached school age. Despite her apparent intellectual disabilities, Rosemary participated in most family activities. In the diary she kept as a teenager she described people she met, dances and concerts she attended, and a visit to the Roosevelt White House. When her father was appointed US Ambassador to Britain in 1938, Rosemary went to live in London and was presented at court along with her mother and sister Kathleen.
But when the family returned to the United States in 1940, “Rosemary was not making progress but seemed instead to be going backward,” as her sister Eunice later wrote. “At 22, she was becoming increasingly irritable and difficult.” The following year, after being persuaded that a lobotomy would help to calm his daughter and prevent her sometimes violent mood swings, Joseph Kennedy authorized the operation. The relatively new procedure, which at the time seemed to hold great promise, left Rosemary permanently incapacitated and unable to care for herself. On the recommendation of Archbishop Cushing, Rosemary was sent to St. Coletta’s School for Exceptional Children in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she would live for the rest of her life.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver had a particularly close relationship with her older sister, and great empathy for Rosemary and others who faced similar challenges. In 1962 Mrs. Shriver started a summer day camp in her own back yard for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, a camp which evolved into Special Olympics, now a global competition that involves 1.4 million athletes from 150 countries.
Rosemary Kennedy died on January 7, 2005 at age 86. Eunice Shriver said in her eulogy that Rosemary had left a legacy that was long and deep. Along with inspiring Mrs. Shriver’s own work with Special Olympics, Rosemary had inspired her brother, President John F. Kennedy, to initiate sweeping legislation designed to improve the quality of life for Americans with disabilities. She had inspired her sister Jean Kennedy Smith to start Very Special Arts and her nephew, Anthony Shriver, to start Best Buddies. Hospitals, schools and other such facilities around the world have been named in honor of Rosemary Kennedy.
Rosemary Kennedy may have spent the majority of her life tucked away in a small town in rural Wisconsin and hard to imagine a world without her having been in it. Would the Kennedy family have had the same sense of social justice? Would Ted Kennedy have dedicated his career to health care, children, women, people with disabilities and other marginalized groups? Would we have the Americans with Disabilities Act, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Fair Housing Act Amendments of 1988?
Would we fighting for health care reform right now?
Dorothea Lange was a photographer and photojournalist best known for her portraits of migrant workers during the Great Depression, such as her legendary Migrant Mother series.
While Lange’s work is famous, not much is known about her personal life. She had a difficult childhood. She contracted polio when she was seven, leaving her with an obvious limp. The neighborhood children shunned her and even her mother acted embarrassed by her “crippled” child. Lange’s father left the family when she was 12 years old.
As a teenager, Lange discovered photography and later made it her career:
The pain of her childhood, however, gave her a fuller sense of what suffering meant, and later on, when the government hired her to document the effects of the depression, it deepened her compassion for the destitution and despair that she saw all around her.
It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, humiliated me, all those things at once. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.
Lange spent her career photographing others who had been marginalized by society: migrant workers in the Great Depression, sharecroppers in the deep South, and Japanese-Americans being evacuated to internment camps in World War II.
As women, we rarely hear about the integral role women have played in history. We know even less about the lives of women with disabilities in history. Throughout the month of March, which is Women’s History Month, I plan to feature women in history, both recent and not-so-recent, who have lived with disability. Some of these women might be famous while others you might never have heard of. First up, Juliette Gordon Low.
Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts
Juliette Gordon Low was born on October 31, 1860, in Savannah, Georgia. As a child, Juliette, known as “Daisy” to her friends and family, developed a lifelong love of the arts. She wrote poetry, sketched, painted, acted in plays and later became an accomplished sculptor.
After attending boarding school in Virginia and New Jersey, Daisy traveled extensively in the United States and Europe. Daisy suffered from chronic ear infections as a young adult. By the time she married William Mackay Low on December 21, 1886, she had lost most of her hearing in one ear due to improper treatment. Unfortunately, Daisy’s wedding day brought an unwelcome gift:
At her wedding, when she was 26, she lost hearing in her other ear after a grain of good-luck rice thrown at the event lodged in her ear. When trying to remove the rice, the doctor punctured the eardrum and damaged the nerve-endings resulting in a total loss of hearing in that ear.
Daisy and William moved to England after the wedding. Daisy temporarily returned to the United States during the Spanish-American war to help her mother organize a convalescent hospital. William Low died in 1905 and in 1911, Daisy met Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, who inspired her to found the Girl Scouts in the United States the following year.
As Daisy encouraged girls to learn about homemaking, arts, science and the outdoors, she also included girls with disabilities, at a time when many organizations excluded them:
“Juliette Low was very open-minded,” says Jami Brantley, historian at Girl Scout First Headquarters, which today showcases vintage uniforms, badges and handbooks, and chronicles the history of the group. “She wanted the organization to not just be for the more elite girls.”
Juliette Gordon Low died of breast cancer on January 17, 1927, in Savannah, Georgia. From the original troop of 18 girls, there are now more than 3.7 million Girl Scouts.
Learn more about the life and work of Juliette Gordon Low:
I am sorry that I haven’t blogged lately but I’ve been having a lot of health problems and barely used a computer the last several weeks. Hopefully, things will get back to normal now. March is National Women’s History Month and I plan to feature prominent women in history with disabilities on the blog throughout the month. This new series start tomorrow so be sure to check it out!
In the meantime, here are a few of the disability-feminist reads I wanted to share from the past couple weeks:
Eva from The Deal with Disability had a guest post at Lesbilicious on being queer and disabled:
Queer people have to come out all the time to family, friends, co-workers, and confused strangers, and it’s really tiring. I have to come out four-fold. I have to come out as a female, as an intelligent adult, as a queer person, and as a butch dyke.
Jennifer Bartlett has an interview with artist Sunuara Taylor up at Feministing entitled Feminism, Disability, and John Currin in which Taylor talks about the social model of disability:
Under this model, the word disabled is used to describe the disabling environment and culture that different bodies live in (for example stairs and negative stereotypes disable me). Impairment is used to describe one’s body, one’s diagnosis (which is in itself arguably a cultural creation). When I hear or say ‘disabled people’ I think of people who are oppressed not by their bodies (or not only by their bodies), but by a discriminating and inaccessible world.
A white woman is marginalized in a different way than a Latina woman is. And a Latina woman is marginalized in a different way than an indigenous woman! A nondisabled woman is marginalized in a different way than a paraplegic woman is… and a paraplegic woman is marginalized in a different way than a bipolar woman is. An upper-middle-class woman in urban New York is marginalized in a different way than a poor woman in urban New York — and a poor woman in New York is marginalized in a different way than a poor woman in Indiana.
There are different mechanisms of marginalization for different types of people — and the greater your difference from the presumed default person, the more different your type of marginalization looks than the privileged-other-than-gender woman.
1. What is your disability or chronic medical condition? How does it affect you both generally and on a daily basis?
I have spina bifida from birth and am a recent left above knee amputee due to a life-threatening infection in my left leg that began as a non-healing pressure sore in my left foot. I am a full-time wheelchair user, but I am full steam ahead independent. I drive both an adapted car with wheelchair topper and full-size adapted van.
2. Do you consider yourself “disabled”? Do other people see you as “disabled”?
I’m a vibrant, independent woman on wheels. My husband and those who know and love me see me as a whole person. What others think doesn’t matter all that much, but I thrive on widening open minds and cracking open closed ones in terms of how they view disability
3. Do people treat you differently or unfairly because of your disability/condition? How so? Can you give an example(s)?
I have been talked down to like I’m a child. I’ve been spoken to loudly as if I had a hearing impairment. My legs don’t work. My ears are just fine. I have been told I was just too darn pretty to be in a wheelchair as if the wheelchair marred my appearance. I don’t think the wheels detract from my appearance at all. My disability is just another part of me like my hair color, eye color, height and other natural attributes. My husband and I are sometimes looked at as if we both have a disability because the obvious misconception is that only people with disabilities want to be with others with disabilities. He’s also been complimented for “taking care of me” when we have a 50-50 marriage. I take care of him in my own way, as he does me. I’ve been complimented that it’s so wonderful that I found a man as if my wheelchair were a deterent to finding a life mate.
4. If you could tell the world one thing about what it’s like to live with your disability/condition, what would it be?
I would have to say that living with a disability is like any other life situation we adapt ourselves to. We adapt to job changes, life changes and relationship changes. That’s what humans were made to do, to adapt. I’m not saying having a disability is the easiest thing in the world to adapt to if it’s a new experience for you, but if you turn off the negative self-talk and the negative misperceptions of society and just take it moment by moment, you’ll be surprised just how well you can live and how much of the world you are able to experience. Do we still have a ways to go in terms of civil rights and accessibility, as well as people’s misperceptions about what we can or cannot achieve? Of course we do! But we also have a ways to go in learning to accept ourselves as whole people in our own right. It starts inside ourselves before we can teach others around us that we are worthy and able.
5. What do you like about living with your disability/condition?
I love that my disability affords people the opportunity to start a conversation about how I get around in the world, about civil rights and accessibility issues. I enjoy the opportunity to turn well-meaning, but wrong comments into a way to teach people the right way to perceive people with disabilities…as people just like them, who happen to maybe go about things in life a little bit differently than they do. We want the same things in all facets of life, but it may take a little creativity and a different method to achieve our goals.
I'm Danine Spencer, a freelance writer based in northern Wisconsin. Please click on the links above to learn more about me and my work. Email me at danine@danine.net Thanks!
Helene was born on September 15, 1911, in Vienna, Austria, to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, who later died in World War I. At 19 years old, Helene began showing signs of schizophrenia. By 1935, her symptoms worsened and she was admitted to Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital in Vienna. 
While Lange’s work is famous, not much is known about her personal life. She had a difficult childhood. She contracted polio when she was seven, leaving her with an obvious limp. The neighborhood children shunned her and even her mother acted embarrassed by her “crippled” child. Lange’s father left the family when she was 12 years old.
Juliette Gordon Low was born on October 31, 1860, in Savannah, Georgia. As a child, Juliette, known as “Daisy” to her friends and family, developed a lifelong love of the arts. She wrote poetry, sketched, painted, acted in plays and later became an accomplished sculptor.
Entries (RSS)