The More We Get Together

Shelley Butler is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at York University.

This collection of 22 essays will be of interest to readers involved
with disability issues, feminist theory, the concept of difference,
Maritime women’s histories, and maternal politics. Originally
presented at the 14th annual conference of the Canadian Research
Institute for the Advancement of Women, held in Charlottetown, in 1990,
the papers focus on four themes—difference and disability, herstory,
caregiving and mothering, and language and writing—and offer a mixture
of personal, political, and theoretical perspectives on women with
disabilities.

An important theme of the collection is the past exclusion of women
with disabilities from the Canadian women’s movement. Contributor
Sharon Stone challenges feminists to acknowledge the particular
experiences of women with disabilities, so that solidarity can be
affirmed within a climate of mutual respect. Interestingly, Stone draws
on black feminists Bell Hooks and Audre Lorde in her theorizing of
difference.

The contributions of Kate Sandilands, Baukje Miedema, and Janet
Stoppard are particularly successful in evoking the complex lives of
women with disabilities. Sandilands considers the possibilities and
problems that ecofeminism poses for these women. Miedema and Stoppard
offer a sensitive interpretation of women’s experiences with
psychiatric hospitalization; they draw upon—and critique—biomedical,
antipsychiatric, and feminist perspectives on mental illness.

Diane Driedger describes how the disability movement has historically
trivialized women’s issues. The More We Get Together corrects this
tendency by addressing gender-specific issues such as maternity,
sexuality, sexual abuse, lesbian histories, caregiving, the feminization
of poverty, and violence against women.

The subject of women with disabilities is not explicitly addressed in
four of the papers: Janet Billson and Joanne Veer on feminism in the
Maritimes; Carolyn Gammon on lesbian studies; Denyse Cote on motherwork;
and Terry Mitchell on the representation of violence against women. An
exploration of the connections between these subjects and the central
one would have been useful.