Disabled women organize worldwide

Off Our Backs, Jan/Feb 2003 by Hershey, Laura

In numerous countries, problems such as poverty, illiteracy, and the subjugation of women are compounded for women with disabilities. General economic conditions, combined with barriers and discrimination, put self-sufficiency out of the reach of many disabled women. Their deprivation is often worsened by cultural attitudes which devalue disabled women. Throughout the world, women with disabilities are rising to these challenges, and looking to new leaders within their communities.

Angelica Monteagudo, of El Salvador, started a support group which met every week in a church. That group grew eventually into a cooperative in which two hundred members, mostly women, make handicrafts.

Organizing is an uphill battle in El Salvador, as in many countries. "The majority of women are poor," Monteagudo says. She adds, "The family doesn't like that we as women go out because of the social problems in my country. The violence has increased after the war."

Monteagudo continues, "And another barrier is bigger. The organization that supposedly works for disabled people-they have a lot of financial support out of the country, international help. But.. . they don't give opportunities to the disabled people ... because sometimes we point to their mistakes and so they close all the opportunities to us."

"A woman in El Salvador has double discrimination," says Monteagudo, "once, because she is a woman and the second, because she is disabled."

These problems plague Americans, too. "It's the same thing in the States," says Zully Alvarado, a Chicago businessperson and advocate. "When you come to corporations, they look at you and you have a disability and they think that you can't even talk for yourself."

Social stigma, political powerlessness, and economic injustice create obstacles for both women and men with disabilities. But many women also encounter sexism from their male colleagues in disability rights movements. In some countries, the established disability-rights movement offers little hope to women. "I'm afraid that the disability movement is as patriarchal as any other cultural context," says Anita Ghai of India. "Right now I'm trying to mainstream the concerns of disabled girls and disabled women into the mainstream feminist movement."

Patrona Sandoval and other Nicaraguan women were excluded from their country's largest disability organization. "This organization... said that because we weren't veterans, we didn't have the right to participate," Sandoval explains. "It was for that reason that I began to organize disabled women. I would visit them house by house until we formed a group."

Katherine Tsegli, Women's Leader of the Ghana Society of the Physically Disabled, remarks, "A lot of our women have financial problems . You see a lot of them by the roadside begging, which will not last for long." Tsegli took it upon herself to do something to help her sisters become workers, not beggars. "I decided to bring them together to form income-generating projects." Members work together to learn sewing skills, then go into business for themselves. Tsegli reports: "Some have taken the initiative and they have started and they are living well. But it's funding that has been a problem for us now."