Review

Stop feeling sorry

Encounters with Strangers: Feminism and Disability
Jenny Morris (ed)
The Women’s Press, 1996, £8.99

Encounters with Strangers integrates feminist issues, for example women’s personal experience of impairment and disability, with the social model of disability developed in the disabled peoples’ movement. I found the book exciting because it is both readable and packed with important information and discussions.

Jenny Morris explains in the introduction that the book grew out of a series of meetings of disabled women. She found that many disabled women feel ‘betrayed and excluded by feminist analysis and activism’, primarily because some feminist academics and policymakers have prioritised the issues of women as carers over the needs of disabled people. However, some key elements of feminism, for example ‘the personal being political’, were relevant to them. She argues that the major problem for disabled people is simply people feeling sorry for them.

There are ten chapters by different disabled women. The chapters cover a wide range of subjects including being a black disabled woman, learning difficulties, mental health survivors, sexual abuse, pre-natal testing, young carers, and disabled women’s experiences of GPs.

Sally French and Ayesha Vernon’s chapters reminded me of the importance of educating disabled children and not medicalising their needs — an issue which needs re-emphasising in current health service thinking.

Lois Keith and Jenny Morris write as mothers about ‘children as carers’. They provide an excellent critique of how the media, statutory organisations, academics, carers organisations and others assume the disabled parent is a burden from which the child has to be rescued.

They stress that the need is for adequate support in order for disabled parents to be able to live and parent independently. This perspective is absent from an abundance of current research on young carers.

Ruth Bailey has written an excellent, accessible chapter on prenatal testing. She addresses the complex and topical subject of genetics. She integrates the perspectives of a woman’s right to choose with non-discriminatory approaches to disability and includes useful recommendations.

‘Including All of Our Lives: renewing the social model of disability’ is beautifully written by Liz Crow. It is the chapter which most explicitly makes demands of the disability movement to be influenced by feminism. It is a courageous chapter. The title illustrates an argument which runs through the book.

While the issues taken up in the past by the disability movement have had an enormous impact on the lives of contributors both personallly and politically, there have been aspects of experience missing that a feminist understanding might contribute.

This book should be read by anyone concerned about the politics of health.