Trouble Is Everywhere

I 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

I know a lot of people skip titles of posts. Please read the title of this one.

I had an argument with someone at school on Thursday and it's still sitting with me. I think this is because we'd had an earlier argument on a similar subject on Tuesday. As you can probably imagine, it was about disability, or more specifically, about how disabled people have existed and advocated for themselves since long before the mainstream folks started paying attention, and well before I ever started paying attention.

The argument on Thursday was about my colleague's disagreement with the abstract for a master's research paper on disability discrimination in the Montreal Metro System. I'm not from Montreal, so the place this system has in Montreal was a bit much for me to grasp. Apparently it's a big thing, a progress thing. A thing about how Montreal has been advancing into the future. When it was opened in 1966, it was opened to everyone.

Everyone, of course, except people who can't walk up and down stairs.

The presentation and follow-up short video talked explicitly about ableist constructions of public spaces. She called it out very bluntly: this is discriminatory. This has always been discriminatory.

The part that others tend not to get, the part my colleague at the university didn't get, is that the people at the time knew this.

This is one of the things about disability-based discrimination that drives me up the wall. The theory that many people express is that no one in the past could possibly have been expected to think about disability as a category because this whole disability rights thing didn't start until [the speaker learned of it, whatever time period that is] and obviously not a moment before. (See: many feminist responses to disability-based critiques online that ignore even something as simple as the presence of disability activists at the Beijing conference in 1995. I've been told again and again and again that disability only became a "thing" to consider in the past few years and it's mostly "oversensitive" types at that. Arg.)

So, let me lay some facts on you:

The late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Metro was being built to be inaccessible to many people with physical disabilities, was also the time when people with disabilities were getting out of unwanted institutional settings. It's called "The Great Exit," and I'm pretty sure you haven't learned of it. The Great Exit didn't happen spontaneously, and it wasn't an austerity measure. People with disabilities campaigned for it. They fought for it. Just like they fought for employment and education in the 1800s and early 1900s in Nova Scotia.

Once they left institutions, people with disabilities fought for employment rights and to live free from discrimination. To some extent, they won. The Quebec Human Rights Act included disability as a protected class, passed in 1975.

Except for transit users. Explicitly, transit was not included, you could not sue for a human rights violation for not being allowed on a bus if you were disabled.

In 1988, ADAPT (a US-based protest group) came to Montreal to highlight how inaccessible the transit system was. This PDF has some of their information [in English] about the protest. It was all over the news, and people were arrested for crashing through barricades with their wheelchairs.

And still, the Metro remained inaccessible. In fact, it wasn't until 2004 - Sixteen Years Later - that the law saying that you couldn't sue for inaccessible transit was struck down, and it wasn't until 2006 that a Metro station was made wheelchair accessible. And even then, it was a debate, and one that apparently was won because it "looked bad" that the Metro was still inaccessible. Not that it was bad, that it looked bad.

The Metro in Montreal is currently being retrofitted to be accessible. The current rate is less than one transit station becoming accessible per year. Again, The Montreal Metro System will be fully wheelchair accessible in 2058.

My colleague argued that it is wrong ("presentist," the worst thing to accuse an historian of being within the discipline) to chide people in the past for not thinking of people with disabilities when they made the Metro. "They didn't know better then. We know better now."

This is a lie. They knew. Disability-based historians and disability rights activists know how far back the fight for equal access goes. It didn't spring, fully formed from the head of Hephaestus, in 1995 in Beijing. It didn't suddenly arrive the day you first learned of it. It's always been here. In ignoring that, in assuming that his ignorance is in fact the truth, my colleague (and many others like him) are betraying their own attitudes about disability, about history, and about what matters.

Don will be 78 years old when he can physically get into every Metro station in Montreal. The lifespan of people with Don's disability is less than that.

Yesterday did not go according to plan, so I've decided not to discuss today's plan in the hopes that this means the imp of the perverse will not hear of it and ruin everything.


marshtide wrote about how archaeologists determine the sex of a skeleton.

zingerella wrote about etiquette rules for visiting Government House, which include reminders not to molest the hat rack.

sid asked about turns of phrase in English that have survived well past the things they refer to, such as "lock stock & barrel".

licht has written Waffle Dos & Don'ts, which a) amuses me far more than perhaps is necessary (Waffles may bring about world peace!) and b) makes me think of bubusquared because of her constant assurance that Belgian Waffles do not come from Belgium. (I assure you, if you don't have a Melle in your life, you are missing out.)

adsartha wrote about migraine triggers.

marina wrote about disability-related issues in Israel, discussing accessibility legislation and universities and the IDF.

shanaqui wrote about Health Anxiety/Hypochondria.

I've really liked pretty much every episode reaction I've read to The Impossible Astronaut. Here is boji's, which I liked a lot.

pipisafoat wrote about shopping for clothing when genderqueer.

I made a post a few days ago inviting people to basically ask me to talk about disability history FOREVER. But it is also open to other people to talk about disability history forever. Please feel free to leave prompts or write responses!

[I have Dreamwidth invites if people would like them.]

A bunch of awesome people I know are doing Three Weeks for Dreamwidth where they are accepting prompts and will write answers to questions about their topics. This started with dingsi. There is a master list!

(FONSFAQ: Frequently (Or Not So Frequently) Asked Question)

I thought I would love to be asked (and answer) questions about disability history! Because I love it like ice cream.

(In fact, you'd be doing me a huge favour by asking these questions. Don & I are playing around with an idea about a disability history related podcast this summer, and having some idea what people might be interested in knowing would be helpful.)

Things I do not know the answers to easily, I will happily research.

Please leave prompts! Preferred style would be PROMPT in the subject heading of the comment, but don't fret the details. Also, please feel free to signal boost this, as I would love an excuse to talk about my interests with everyone in the world. All the time. (Also, feel free to leave multiple prompts.)

check out Dingsi's prompt page for more ideas.

ETA: I forgot to tell people that they are welcome to claim and write about any of these! Please don't take my comments as claiming them for just me. It's a huge field, and I would love to see other people's responses. :D

Okay, every time I try to embed this something happens and it fails, woe.

YouTube video: Viva Roman No. V., set to the tune of Mambo #5. It is everything something with that name could possibly be! (Also, it's subtitled.)

( lyrics )

Okay, come on. What sort of note is this:

It having come to the knowledge of the board that the best of feelings does not exist between the Teachers & Pupils with the Steward & Matron it was the unanimous opinion of all present that a change was desirable.

It was decided to leave the matter for the actions of the House Committee.

You know what has not seemed to survive? House Committee Minutes.

Damn it, everyone knows that the thing that gets people all interested in dead people is random gossip. And now I have none.

(Although this is the same Steward & Matron that were responsible for the only female Superintendent the Asylum for the Blind ever had been quietly fired for undefined inappropriate behaviour that had something to do with setting a visiting schedule and the scandal was so great that they refused to write down what she had done and agreed to give her an excellent reference so no hint of scandal would ever hit and her for crying out loud can't you just tell me what she did?)

Seriously: dead people are really irritating.

I'm on a couple of discussion lists about history that aren't (all) academics talking (I'm sure there are a few.) It frustrates me how absolutely dominated these discussions are by "war" histories. I feel like quietly sneaking a bunch of Canadianists in and having a rollicking discussion about Confederation. Maybe we can have a good academic bicker about whether or not Louis Riel is a hero or a traitor. Or both.