Willow the yew tree

Every person need to be taught disability history

Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.

Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”

Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.

Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.

Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.

Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”

Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.

Teach about us.

British Disability history masterpost:

Resources

National Disability Arts Collection and Archive

Tony Baldwinson - has documented and archived a huge amount of our history. Also has things like timelines. Based in Manchester

Disabled People's Archive - centered in Manchester

How was school? - oral history on education

Studymore - mental health history

Social History of Learning Disability - learning disability history

Leeds University disability studies archive - a bit more academic but a good resource

British Deaf history society

The Deaf Visual Archive

Disability oral history british library

Community Deaf Archives - links to Northern Irish and Sussex Deaf community archives

History of British Sign Language

Disability activism in Bristol - oral history of the disabled people's movement in bristol

Leonard Cheshire Disability Archive - charity archive but also set up some of the earliest independent living houses.

As a general rule try searching for location + disabled coalition to find disabled lead organisations.

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Key events in the British disabled people's movement to 2003

1965-70: The National Campaign for the Young Chronic Sick - early campaign for independent living

1972/3: Foundation of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) who would publish the Fundamental Principles of Disability in 1975 which formally laid out the ideas behind the social model.

1976: Grove Road Housing Scheme - Ostensibly the birth of independent living in the UK.

1981: International year of disabled people, Formation of British Council of Organisations of Disabled People

1984: Hampshire Centre for Independent Living set up, the first in the UK

1987: British Deaf Association launch campaign for the recognition of BSL

1990-93: Block Telethon protests against ITV telethon (later cancelled) and children in need.

1993: Disabled People direct action network (DAN) founded. Responsible for many protests nationwide.

1995: Disability Discrimination Act (worth noting that while this was a victory, the majority of disabled activists felt ans continue to feel that this did not go far enough)

1999: first march in the campaign for the recognition of BSL

2000: largest march for the recognition of BSL

2003: BSL is legally recognized as a language. In April 2022, BSL was finally recognised as an official language of the UK.

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Bonus: Chronic illness inclusion project - project discussing the inclusion of chronically ill people in the social model and disability activism - see this post for more details

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Please add on with more stuff, particularly on Deaf history as I don't know much about that

my bbc ghosts s05 countdown: favorite dynamic

↳ The Captain & Kitty

So I binge watched series five of Ghosts and this was one of my favourite moments 🐱🎈✨

People think being self aware cancels out mental illness. That when you realise your thoughts or behaviours are irrational you just stop having/doing them

Instead what happens if you're extremely self aware and mentally ill is that you just think in a resigned kind of way "I'm being really fucking crazy right now" while being very loudly mentally ill

Sometimes you are able to tell the people around you "oh, you can ignore me rn. I'm just being extremely mentally ill rn. It will eventually pass" and then continue your erratic behaviour. But mostly it's just privately thinking: "well this is embarrassing but I can't turn it off so just gotta deal with it I guess."

It's infuriating honestly

Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.

YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.

This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were

1) so vital, and

2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.

“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”

Original article: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” (pdf download from Harvard)

If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?

They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:

If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)

And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.

The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”

Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.

And until this post, I bet you didn’t know.

If you know Discworld, you know the observations about “ladies who organize”?

That’s not something Pterry made up. That is reality. Ladies Who Organize have been a major driving force of history - usually unremembered b/c everyone remembers the guy who was officially involved and not, eg, his wife who organized a massive letter writing campaign and seven soirées that funded Mr Historical’s entire enterprise.

Ladies Who Organize both started and ended Prohibition, as noted above funded American Independence, and were the ONLY people who got their shit together with regards to eg the 1918 Flu in a lot of cities (Philadelphia is a really great example).

Ladies Who Organize is just ONE area of history where that’s the case. It’s just they did things in mostly socially accepted ways and when they pushed the envelope they did it strategically and tactically, leveraging whatever else they had to offset that.

Now, we get to know about them because they were not only nearly universally literate but MASSIVELY WORKED VIA LETTERS so as we started actually paying attention we had sources. Imagine how many of these we’ve lost because the record ONLY contained the other stuff.

For the record, this is what the phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history” actually means.

That’s not me just saying that, that’s what the author of the book by that name meant by it:

i wrote this in the notes of another post originally and am copy + pasting it here because im right but "tell the cops nothing, tell the doctors everything" is such a stupid ass fucking abled take. doctors engage in policing idk how to explain to yall that some people cannot in fact just tell doctors everything without it putting them at risk

like im not gonna go into the myriad of ways this is bs but like a quick example is i cant tell my doctors about my substance use issues because if i get that listed on my medical records it will actively endanger me. It will impact how I'm treated in emergency situations and will get me labeled as "drug seeking" when i try to get other issues dealt with.

i dont say this to scare people but because this is actually important information for people to have. if a medical professional claims this isnt an issue, they are NOT "one of the good ones". they are either straight up lying or theyre utterly unaware, which is frankly not better. doctors are cops. never forget it

like YES tell ur doctor abt being sexually active but stop saying "tell the cops nothing and the doctor everything" before i start killing in cold blood

I had a doctor once ask my father to leave the room, then proceeded to tell me that my sore throat was all in my head, and I was making it up for attention -- because I was bipolar. I told him no, that wasnt the case, I was genuinely sick, and he rolled his eyes, said he would do a strep test "to make me feel better", did the test, and left. 20 minutes later he came back and told me the strep test came back positive. No apology, nothing.

This was for strep throat. I had similar things happen for much more important stuff that I dont want to get into. I'm in the middle of a very long process for a condition thats giving me progressive spinal cord damage, and all I can think about is that if I had "substance use disorder" on my medical record, how likely is it that I would just not have been listened to about this. If you have anxiety youre a "hypochondriac". If you're an addict you're "drug seeking". if you're bipolar or schizospec you're making it up, possibly for attention. This shit kills people. This isnt even getting into the inherently carceral nature of the psychiatric system in the US (and elsewhere)

Doctors are not, in fact, neutral figures that can be blindly trusted with any and all information, and pretending they are can literally get people killed. Abled people have GOT to do better.

my dad basically conspired with a psychiatrist I saw to get me overmedicated so he could make a medical neglect argument TOWARDS MY MOM in court. psychiatrist didn't care at all

guy who has chronic pain and fatigue: man why can't i do more stuff

guy who has chronic pain and fatigue: man i'm so tired today for some reason