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troubleI went to a talk yesterday about the building of the wall at 99 Queen Street West in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The wall was built by people incarcerated at the insane asylum there over 100 years ago. They were not paid for their work, unlike people in insane asylums in France, and unlike people in Canadian penitentiaries. In fact, the budget for the asylum depended on unpaid labour from the people incarcerated there: after finding that one of their inmates was an expert seamstress, they fired their two employees who were doing the sewing and gave it all to her. Women worked in the laundry their entire lives without pay, and when an 82 year old woman said she didn't want to do it anymore, it was presented as an oddity in her file, further evidence of her insanity. Another woman, after being incarcerated for over 26 years, kept sending letters back asking to be given backpay for her work.
The wall was backbreaking labour. It was done without pay, and without credit. The directors of the asylum bragged about how they were saving money by having their inmates do this work.
Today is International Women's Day. I don't think we're going to spend a lot of time acknowledging the lives of Canadian women who lived and worked and died behind asylum walls. Madness scares people, after all.
As Geoffrey Reaume pointed out in his talk last night: there's a rhetoric that people who are mad or crazy or insane can't work, that their work is shoddy and poorly done because they're crazy and can't be trusted to do it. And yet that wall on Queen's Street West is over 100 years old, and it is amazing workmanship, and it still stands as the only memorial to the often faceless men who put it up, whose work was valuable enough to save the province literally tens of thousands of dollars, but whose names were never recorded.
Psychiatric Patient Built Wall Tours at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Toronto, 2000 – 2010
Rembrance of Patients Past by Geoffrey Reaume
History of Madness in Canada
Psychiatric Survivors Archives of Toronto
The wall was built by people incarcerated at the insane asylum there over 100 years ago. They were not paid for their work, unlike people in insane asylums in France, and unlike people in Canadian penitentiaries. In fact, the budget for the asylum depended on unpaid labour from the people incarcerated there: after finding that one of their inmates was an expert seamstress, they fired their two employees who were doing the sewing and gave it all to her. Women worked in the laundry their entire lives without pay, and when an 82 year old woman said she didn't want to do it anymore, it was presented as an oddity in her file, further evidence of her insanity. Another woman, after being incarcerated for over 26 years, kept sending letters back asking to be given backpay for her work.
The wall was backbreaking labour. It was done without pay, and without credit. The directors of the asylum bragged about how they were saving money by having their inmates do this work.
Today is International Women's Day. I don't think we're going to spend a lot of time acknowledging the lives of Canadian women who lived and worked and died behind asylum walls. Madness scares people, after all.
As Geoffrey Reaume pointed out in his talk last night: there's a rhetoric that people who are mad or crazy or insane can't work, that their work is shoddy and poorly done because they're crazy and can't be trusted to do it. And yet that wall on Queen's Street West is over 100 years old, and it is amazing workmanship, and it still stands as the only memorial to the often faceless men who put it up, whose work was valuable enough to save the province literally tens of thousands of dollars, but whose names were never recorded.
Psychiatric Patient Built Wall Tours at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Toronto, 2000 – 2010
Rembrance of Patients Past by Geoffrey Reaume
History of Madness in Canada
Psychiatric Survivors Archives of Toronto
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