No More Stares
Until recently nobody talked much about being disabled. Especially disabled people. Most disabled people, including the women who put this book together, were the last ones who wanted to point out that we were different.
Well, times have changed. Now disabled people see that this silence has made it harder for us to figure out how to live our lives. We have found that if we don’t talk about problems, nothing changes. We’ve learned that we can’t live in a vacuum. We need to know what other people with disabilities have done so we can have some idea about what is possible for our future.
There are a few success stories that disabled persons are told as children. For boys, it’s FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first and only American president who had polio. For girls, it’s Helen Keller.
Helen Keller was a remarkable deaf-blind woman who found language and expression late in her childhood working with her partially-sighted teacher Ann Sullivan. Ms. Keller’s life contains a very dramatic story that starts with complete isolation and ends up with international recognition and admiration. It’s such a good story that it’s been told again and again-in books, plays, movies, tv programs—until now the story is larger than life. At least bigger than many of our lives.
It’s sometimes hard to see what Helen Keller’s triumph has to do with the smaller frustrations of being disabled: not being able to go to the movies because of a flight of stairs; not wanting to walk your dog because people stare at you; not having the money to pay for a modified van, a TTY (telephone adapter for deaf people), or an Opticon (reading device for blind people).
So the women who put this book together decided that more stories needed to be told. The women who talk about their lives in No More Stares represent all races, all disabilities, all age groups. Some of their stories are as dramatic as Helen Keller’s though the women themselves aren’t famous. Others talk about more down to earth things like how they learned to drive, or how they clean house.
You may feel you have something in common with Helen Keller, or you may not. But after reading all the stories in this book, you might begin to feel that you share common experiences with other disabled women.
The disabled women who put this book together definitely feel this way. Though we are of different races and disabilities, we share a lot. We’ve all been told, some more, some less, that we’re not OK, that we’re not equal. We’ve all been stared at, we have been kept out of schools, jobs, concerts, parties, careers, etc. We’ve been kept out by physical barriers (like stairs and the lack of aids for vision or hearing impaired persons) and mental or attitudinal barriers (excuses like, “You’ll upset the customers if we put you in the front office,” or “A deaf person can’t teach.”)
Those of us who worked on this book have a discovery we want to share with you: because we talked to each other about our everyday lives as disabled women we have felt better about ourselves, more able to live life as fully as we can.
How you feel about yourself is what’s most important. When you feel good about yourself you can grow and change. But everybody, disabled or not, has trouble feeling good about themselves. Everybody at times feels either too fat or too thin, too short or too tall&mdashtoo awkward, too dumb. Most girls walk around hating themselves for not looking like a model.
When you can’t go to the same movies or parties as everyone else because there’s no ramp; when you can’t attend after-school activities because there’s no sign language interpreter; when you can’t read the same books as your friends because they’re not in braille; or when no one will take the extra time to understand your speech, it can really get hard to feel good about yourself. It’s hard but not impossible, because none of those things are your fault. We wrote this book to prove it.
We hope that by reading this book, that by hearing of the thoughts and feelings of a wide range of women with disabilities, by looking at photographs showing disabled women doing just about every conceivable thing, you might feel better about yourself and more excited about the possibilities of the future.
We hope many people, including men and non-disabled people, will enjoy this book, find it interesting, even illuminating. But to begin and end with, it’s a book for and about disabled women and girls. No More Starestells the story of Anna, a young girl who in her own funny dramatic way is at war with the world that makes her feel different. When we first meet Anna she has been attending a mainstreamed school for the first time in her life. Though she’s made friends and does ok with the books, things aren’t going well for her. In fact, if Anna’s waging a war, it seems like she’s about to surrender. Or is she?