It's Time We Learned

Why Should A Disabled Woman Who Has To Worry
About Getting Attendant Care, Housing,
Accessible Transportation, Family Support, A Job
And A Vacation Learn To Read And Write?

Women with disabilities face a unique struggle in acquiring literacy skills. Not only do they need to improve their education level to manage competently in a highly technical society, but they struggle with the double burden of being disabled and female in a society which for so long has been dominated by men in an able-bodied culture. All three areas of vulnerability need to be presented here to clearly illustrate the additional difficulties encountered by disabled women who do not have the literacy skills to function fully in Canadian society.

Women in Canada lobbied to acquire the vote, to become pilots of their own fates and owners of their own property (including their very persons). Conversely, women who were disabled have been segregated, often institutionalized and rejected by society as a whole. Only radicals believed that disabled women could contribute to society for, if one was disabled, she ought not to jeopardize the gene pool by producing "defective" offspring, or if producing classically healthy children, she could not raise them herself, and so she had no role in society. While the women's liberation movement and equal rights efforts should have emancipated all women, those with disabilities were still safe targets for old-fashioned views and lowered expectations.

The champions of the Civil Rights movement did not advocate an "integration" that permitted black-only schools, or black-only classes within neighbourhood schools. Integration meant that students of both races were interspersed, integrated within the fabric of the school. To do otherwise would have served to perpetuate the sub-standard education offered to the black minority group. Arguments ensued that white students would reject peers of the visible minority, that white families would protest and haul their children out of schools where they feared the standards would be reduced. But these assumptions ultimately were proved false, and in the interim, were not accepted as reasonable arguments against integration. Indeed, integration within the schools set the tone and example for civil and social integration at that time.

How ironic that for people with disabilities, these assumptions remain as valid arguments for segregation outside of the mainstream whether in school, housing, or social spheres.

Rosa Parks caused an uproar when she refused to relinquish her seat to a white man on the bus. Disabled women are not even allowed on the bus! Instead, if any transportation is available in their communities at all, they ride in separate vehicles, segregated from the mainstream of society.

The issue of integration is central to an examination of the problems disabled women face when their handicaps are compounded by weak literacy skills. The fact that women had not been expected to integrate in any socially relevant way has been one of the underlying assumptions in developing educational and service policies for children and adults with disabilities. Along with the assumption that disabled people could not contribute to society came service structures and mechanisms which underlined this deficit, and, eventually, contributed to the perpetuation of its own false assumption.