'Disabled We Stand' and its contemporary relevance.'Disabled We Stand' was my first book, commissioned by the publishers for International Year of Disabled People. It won the Oddfellows Social Concern Book Award, which effectively meant that it was voted the best book about disability published in the UK during IYDP. Five years later, its American edition won the Book Award of the President's Committee on Employment of the Handicapped.
What made 'Disabled We Stand' special was that it was the first book to articulate the new, more uncompromising mood springing up among disabled people. Its opening paragraph anticipated what would subsequently be formulated as the Social Model of Disability: 'Increasingly, we are jettisoning passive acceptance of our situations, taking pride in ourselves and our bodies, and coming to see ourselves as disabled, if we are disabled at all, not by the idiosyncracies of our bodies, but by a society which is not prepared to cated to our needs.'
I argued that we were not pathetic victims but an oppressed minority. Three chapters describe major areas of discrimination: Access, Employment and Education. I then discussed stereotypes of disability, and argued that there exists in society a 'disabled' role which we are conditioned to accept. I also, in a chapter which provoked a lot of complaint, described the degrading and dehumanising ways in which disabled people may be treated by the medical profession.
Before writing 'Disabled We Stand', I carried out interviews with a number of other disabled people. One important element of the book is that it reflects the direct experience of seven other disabled people, speaking in their own words. But I also talk about my own experience: I have epilepsy, and I know that a number of other epileptics have found it valuable to find someone else with their hidden disability coming out epileptic.
The growth of the disability movement, and the fight for civil rights legislation, have dealt with some of the direct discrimination I described. But in focusing on legislation, and the social model of disability, we have forgotten the classic feminist lesson that 'the personal is political'. I recently wrote, in a review of John Diamond's 'C:Because Cowards Get Cancer Too' that 'we, asa movement, have lost this directness, this honesty. We talk about our oppression, but not our fears. We all have to be proud and strong, making no public admission of personal difficulty with our impairments, of depression or fear. In doing so, we have cut ourselves off from humanity and from truth.'
I think the most imortant thing that 'Disabled We Stand' has to offer to modern readers is this sense of the personal as a central part of our politics.
Allan Sutherland
