Women’s Disability Activism – Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive

This collection gathers a selection of materials from the archive related to women and disability as well as articles focused on health and illness as they pertain to women and their experiences personally, politically, and socially. The collection begins with a selection of materials from the DisAbled Women’s Network (DAWN), an organization that developed as a result of the exclusion of women with disabilities from both the women’s movement and disability advocacy in the 1980’s. Beyond DAWN, women’s disability/illness/health advocacy mainly occurred through miscellaneous activities and articles, as well as publications such as Healthsharing: a Canadian publication that provided information for women from a non-medical perspective. This collection aims to create a space on Rise Up!’s archive to easily access some of these materials and to highlight the women’s disability activism that took place between the 1970s-1990s in Canada.

The DisAbled Women’s Network (DAWN)

The DisAbled Women’s Network / Réseau d’action des femmes handicapées du Canada (DAWN-RAFH Canada) was founded in 1985 following a meeting between seventeen women from across Canada who came together to discuss issues of mutual concern. It was a feminist not-for-profit organization formed to bring attention to the special problems facing women with disabilities. DAWN is an organization that works towards the advancement and inclusion of women and girls with disabilities and deaf women in Canada.

A few key reports and letters by DAWN illustrate the type of advocacy work that was done during this period, such as bringing awareness to and fighting against the disproportionate rate of violence against disabled women. DAWN still exists today, and continues their advocacy for women from all backgrounds with disabilities and highlights the higher rates of discrimination BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities with disabilities face.

Listen to Pat Israel, one of the founders of DAWN, speak with Rise Up! about the work of the organization, with emphasis on the additional difficulties faced by disabled women in accessing the mainstream women’s movement. Read the transcript here.

Labour

A major consideration in the feminist labour movement has always been workplace health and safety, particularly as it pertains to professions dominated by women and racialized workers, such as homeworkers in the garment industry. Without proper health and safety precautions and protections in the workplace, compounded by systemic racism in Canada, women in these professions are more at risk of injury, illness, and long term disability. These articles provide a glimpse into some of the labour advocacy for women’s health and safety in the workplace that took place from the 1970s-90s.

HealthSharing

Published between 1979 to 1993, HealthSharing was a magazine dedicated to providing information regarding women’s health from a non-medical perspective. Health issues that were understood to primarily affect women* such as PMS and postpartum depression were given a platform that resisted the biomedical model of healthcare in Canada. HealthSharing provided a space where women’s voices and experiences could be shared with others, actively challenging an individualistic understanding of disability. The magazine’s editors and contributors viewed disability as a product of collective social, environmental, and political circumstances, rather than an innate biological trait. This selection of issues provides a snapshot of the kind of subjects that were discussed in HealthSharing, including invisible disabilities, psychiatric incarceration, disability and the environment, and more!

*These health issues are, of course, not only experienced by people who identify as women, but also trans men, non-binary folks, and other members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Periodicals

This section provides a window into discussions that were happening outside of publications or organizations specifically dedicated to women’s health and disability. While initiatives like DAWN and HealthSharing carved out spaces for women’s disability issues, discourse around disability, chronic illness, and women’s health was very much present within the women’s movement as a whole, illustrated through these periodicals.

Browse the full issues:

Broadside – Vol. 7, No. 7 – May 1986
Pandora – Vol. 2, Issue 3 – March 1987
feminist ACTION féministe – Vol. 3, No. 4 & 5 – September 1988
The Other Woman – Vol. 3, No. 3 – Winter 1975
Pandora – Vol. 3, Issue 2 – December 1987
Broadside – Vol. 1, No. 2 – November 1979
Tapestry – A Feminist Quarterly – Summer 1988

Media & Ephemera

Disability, chronic illness, and women’s health were not only discussed in organizations and publications, but also in feminist arts and culture. From the 1970s-1990s, subjects such as psychiatric incarceration and the hyper-medicalization of women’s lives dominated discourses around mental health and women’s health more broadly, reflected in the media of the time. A major flashpoint in the arts world was Sheila Gilhooly’s Still Sane, an exhibition and later book (of the same name) published by Persimmon Blackridge. Still Sane explores Gilhooly’s incarceration in psychiatric hospitals after she told her psychiatrist she was a lesbian. Also featured in our collection are a few films by the NFB and Studio D, an issue of Matriart with the theme “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Health”, and some banners from women’s health centres that participated in The Banner Project.