That there are social and political environments surrounding socio-economic values affecting impairment can be seen in The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier, edited by Allister Campbell. Numerous contributors identify the surround…
That there are social and political environments surrounding socio-economic values affecting impairment can be seen in The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier, edited by Allister Campbell. Numerous contributors identify the surrounding values of Thatcherism and Reaganism as the waters in which the Common Sense Revolution was immersed. They included fear of encouraging or supporting dependency. The result was a welfare (Ontario Works) program and the Ontario Disability Support Program, which are designed to keep the poor, poor; and to make them feel badly about themselves for being poor.
To help counter those values, I was part of the Inter-religious Social Assistance Review Committee which sought to put in place in government the principles of Transitions: Report of the Social Assistance Review Committee. Those principles recognized that poverty, including dependency, was not due to individual moral inadequacy, but to individual incapacities overwhelmed by systemic issues (governments unwilling to recognize responsibilities for economic structures which affect housing2 health, education for less able people, and a healthy environment (e.g., the Walkerton poison water crisis Inside Walkerton: Canada's worst-ever E. coli contamination | CBC News). It called for sufficient financing for people to keep warm, dry, sheltered, well nutritioned with even fresh fruit in the winter, adequate clothing, enough money for some diversion, and support to acquire gear needed to gain some particular jobs (such as steel-towed boots). As the changes were phased in, the regional social services department met monthly with NGO front-line providers from across the Niagara peninsula, to discuss how our clients learned about and perceived the changes in the system as explained by their workers. These meetings helped the social services staff improve communications to and through their workers, and helped front-line providers perceive clearly what our clients should be understanding. It was a very beneficial collaboration and continued even after the reforms ceased.
It is on these personal and professional bases that I state my opinions about government assistance in Ontario, and my agreement with the authors that the earlier attitudes persist.
This perception is supported also by Health for All: a Doctor's Prescription for a Heathier Canada, by former Canada Minister of Health and current Medical Director of Queen's University Medical School, Jane Philpott. She cites the 2008 final report of WHO's Commission on Social Determinants of Health. It had just three recommendations for policy makers:
Improve daily living conditions
Tackle the inequitable distributions of power, money, and resources, and
Measure and understand the problem and assess the impact of action.
She asks:
If we cannot hear the voices of the people with disabilities, is it because they are literally or figuratively voiceless? Or have we deliberately silenced them? Do we go out of our way not to hear them?...If power is activated by noise {squeaking wheel gets the oil}, what responsibility do decision-makers have to listen for the barely audible? {Here she directly addresses the COVID crisis in Canada.}…I had often used the term vulnerable to describe people living with disabilities….But vulnerability can often be misinterpreted as weakness, and it sounds pejorative. The effort it takes to persevere, given these preconditions, shows more strength of character than you'd find inside many of us with the full ability of our bodily functions.Politics is nothing but medicine writ large. It's the leap from healing individuals to healing society.
Older history:
No Right to be Idle: the Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s, by Sarah F. Rose is one of several books which cites information from Schweik (above). It tells in great detail a history of disability in the U.S. This book is concerned with the changes in the concept of disability from before WWI, to the way veterans in particular were regarded after the war.
The "problem" of disability…lay not in the actual bodies of disabled people, but rather in the meanings assigned to those impairments by employers and policy makers, as well as how those meanings intersected with shifting family capacities, a rapidly changing workplace, public policies aimed at discouraging dependency, and the complexity and mutability of disability itself.
…as a concept, disability had become synonymous with dependency on public or charitable aid, poor citizenship, and the inability to care for oneself or do labor worthy of recompense – a status that not only threatened individuals' morals but also those of the nation.
Rose writes that the move from farms to cities reduced the sizes of families and concentrated the need for individual contributions – the smaller family was less able to support the individual, and that person might not be able alone to support the smaller family.
Moreover, the shift to industrialization and the assembly line placed emphasis on inter-operability, i.e., any person should be able to do any of the jobs. The notable exception was Henry Ford, regarding veterans especially, but not exclusively. He required three departments to cooperatively exercise particular responsibilities to employ disabled men at the standard day's pay. To read many really fascinating examples of extraordinary effort in this regard, read her chapter on this. Ford emphasized finding tasks and environment appropriate to the worker's abilities and decreed that no one of these could be fired by anyone lower than the department head; some could be fired only by Ford himself. It was found, for example, that blind men could sort screws, nuts, and bolts more efficiently that sighted men. Men suffering from shell shock were placed far away from noisy machinery, and areas of work for the blind or those who had difficulty walking were cleared of things which might trip them or injure their heads or other body parts. One epileptic fellow who actually fell into a vat of paint was simply relocated to an area which could be reached without entering the paint works. The list of adaptations by Ford is really quite impressive.
Generally, however, industry avoided impaired people in order to escape paying compensation. When new government programs began to stipend laid off workers because of impairments, employer willingness, including Ford, to adapt the workplace, declined. This trend affected even Goodwill Industries, who found that the cost of keeping some people employed without productive work exhausted their budgets. I won't go more deeply into all this because the point is to trace the history of dominant attitudes toward impairment, not to chronicle all the specific actions that helped or hindered, although they are very interesting.
The problem is not just the attitudes, but also the built environment.
The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access by David Gissen, posits that architects (Gissen's profession in Austria and the U.S.) should re-think their designs to make buildings, cities, and planned views of great buildings and landscapes, include impaired people as a matter of course, rather than as an exception. Gissen himself lost one leg and has other difficulties, but chooses to refer to himself as impaired, which led to the title of this post.
He, too, shows the history of our attitudes toward impairment. Gissen, citing Schweik, describes the "city beautiful" movement in the UK in the nineteen twenties, which advocated 3putting Nature into cities (although a perfected Nature, with no ill-formed trees, for example), while placing "blind, deaf, and epileptics" in areas of exurban nature to separate them from others (a common practice) but also to potentially rehabilitate their bodies and minds through contact with nature.
Gissen writes that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments of urban areas conceived of cities as flow-though areas3 facilitating transportation, water, sewage, and air flow for health reasons, but tending to be areas populated by financially well-off and therefore physically well-off as well, relegating less affluent and impaired people to the outskirts, distant from the most beautiful areas. He also shows that Vitruvius' diagram of human proportions (rendered here by Da Vinci)
were accepted as ideal proportions for designing public buildings and monuments. People whose bodies did not match these could instinctively feel out of place. He quotes the nineteenth-century German historian Heinrich Wölfflin: "Slender people tend to prefer buildings with slender proportions, …stocky people buildings with greater mass….The corporeality of architectural forms…features human faces within built forms," e.g., windows and doors forming the eyes and mouth of the human face. More: "deviations from symmetry in architecture create unease because they evoke disfigurements of the human body and its form – such as amputations and 'mutilated limbs.'" Remember that Gissen, a professor in New York and in Vienna, speaks from within the profession. He shows that these ways of looking at architecture still influence the current profession.
…some of us comprehend lectures better because we communicate with sign language; we walk better when a room is well ventilated because we wear artificial limbs that generate excessive heat around our bodies, which is dissipated by moving air; we can better understand and 'see' art when the temperature in a gallery is cooler because we touch artifacts and the differences in temperature enable us to understand their materials.
Like other types of disability politics, this rejects the belief that norms and averages should define the character of an environment within which people are immersed.
Gissen writes also about the construction of architecture: in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, iron and concrete were introduced often as part of an effort to "deskill" labour. With these methods of construction, there was less need of skilled artisans and wood carvers and sculptors, whose guilds used to control the pace and timing of construction for safety reasons. Disabled people were more likely employed where less skill was needed, and they could be interchangeable with other workers, to some extent (but remember the Ford exception). However, the work was often more dangerous because of their impairments.
As we reconsider how we think about impaired people, we probably think first of a disability and the physical adaptations which are possible; then, perhaps, of the medical assistance and financial supports. But impaired people themselves are interested to get into life as much as others, including gainful employment.
Gissen offers a striking example of the evolution of disability into architecture and construction. Post-WWI Austrian veterans returned to their home areas around Vienna, which was then a Leninist-controlled city. They bivouacked outside the city and organized themselves to build new homes. They set up tasks according to the abilities of each person – measuring, moving, sorting, stockpiling, cutting, fixing, etc., and were quite adept at their work. This astonished everyone, but especially the city government, who wanted to take credit for whatever successes were available. So they assigned three architects to study the men's work and designs. The architects then designed models of homes which could be most easily built by these disabled veterans! And they were built and occupied by them.
4 See The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains, by Clayton Page Aldern for information about the neurological damage which will be increasingly caused in humans and other living things by climate changes.
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