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LETTERS Dear WEdf I really enjoy this publication and the latest issue, “Perspectives on Education from Women with Disabilities,” is fantastic! Thanks so much! It's great to see disability issues in a “mainstream” journal. I am a feminist researcher with a disability. At present I have two part-time jobs and I'm an external part-time Ph.D. student at Sterling University in Scotland. I'm doing a comparative research study of Scotland and Canada looking at how cultural concepts of gender and disability impact on employment for women with disabilities. Finding articles of this caliber is like panning for gold. It's very rare to see gender, disability issues, education and employment dealt with in such a clear and concise manner. CONGRATULATIONS and keep up the good work! Nancy E. Hansen Dear WEdf: Thank you for the intelligence, energy, and courage you've shown in putting together two great issues in a row. I photocopied “Gender and Math: Putting Differences in Perspective” by Meredith Kimball to give to the math department of the institution where I work, and the article generated thoughtful responses. I sent copies of “The Equity Franchise” to women, whom I knew, like me, would be encouraged to see their own painful experience of discrimination at work so clearly and expertly analyzed and corroborated. After reading Pauline Rankin's “The Average Student,” along with all the other perspectives on education from women with disabilities, I vowed to Challenge the myth of the average student wherever I come across it at my own institution. Thanks to all your contributors for two great issues! Kathleen Vance
Dear WEdf: In May of this year, our women's Outreach Project received a letter confirming that the national Outreach program will be no more after March 1997. While the letter made some reference to possible future federal funding under such options as Employment Assistance Services, such funding will be left to local CEC/HRC offices whose project/programming budgets are not expected to be increased from prior years and in fact may be decreased. In our area, community-based projects are lining up to compete for those scarce dollars: trying to discern what populations are “hot,” meeting with local MPs, and figuring out ways to market to those UI/EI recipients of the future if whose “vouchers” may become crucial to keeping a project viable. Our reconnaissance indicates women are not on the priority list' and we already know that most of our agency clients have not been UI/EI eligible. We have also had the potential of provincial dollars brought to our attention. But the mechanisms for federal/provincial, transfer of training responsibilities are not in place and, moreover, in Ontario at least, it is very clear that women-focused services of any kind are not a priority. So what is to become of the women we serve and the effective services we have built over many years to address the specific needs of women? Is it really the case that women have “made it,” that we should “mainstream” women's services because specialized services are too costly, that the specter of poverty for women has disappeared sufficiently that we can let our concern (and work) pass into. history? If this description represents neither the present or the foreseeable future, then what, if anything, are we prepared to do? It is time for women who are involved in women's outreach and employment services to do something, together, rather than watch HRDC abandon women. We need to rally concerned women and to bombard Minister Doug Young with an expression of that concern If any of your magazine's readers are interested in joining together for a national lobby on behalf of women or if they have any other suggestions or ideas, we would love to hear from them. Please contact us. Darlene Labadie Womanpower Inc., 171 Queens Avenue, |
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