Across Borders: Women with Disabilities Working Together

Christine Hughes is a policy analyst at the Ontario Native Affairs
Secretariat.

This edited volume of poetry, short essays, interviews, and personal
stories written by disabled women from around the world emerged as an
international project of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities
(CCD). In 1991, the CCD began a program for women with disabilities that
eventually led to exchange visits, fundraising for literacy, and
self-esteem and assertiveness-training programs run by and for disabled
women. This book documents, from an international perspective, women’s
experiences in forming self-help groups for disabled women.

Originally envisioned as a poetry project, the book evolved to include
essays about the efforts of disabled women to organize themselves and
interviews also of women who attended the Fourth World Conference on
Women in Beijing, China. The book conveys a powerful and positive story
of political activism within the international disabilities movement.

The book begins with a chapter outlining the roots of the disabled
peoples’ movement in general and how disabled women have organized to
fight for improved social and economic status. Readers finish the book
with a greater understanding of how disabled women in the developed and
developing worlds have empowered themselves to address the important
issues facing them: employment, discrimination, education, housing,
transportation, and violence. The volume’s three editors have long
histories of working within the disabilities movements in Canada
(Driedger and Feika) and El Salvador (Girуn Batres).