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From the Margins: Voices of Women with Disabilities
by Jody Hawley, Ph.D., Vocational Rehabilitation Consultant, Visions for Rehabilitation
Employment is considered a key element in full citizenship and is
strongly linked to both disability-related supports and incomes.
Employment provides a sense of fulfilment and self-worth. It is also the
best defence against poverty. With the lowest rate of labour force
success and one of the highest rates of poverty in Canada, women with
disabilities are the most employment challenged of any adult group. This
interaction of gender and disability is further pronounced by racial,
cultural, and sexual orientation.
The researcher uses her twenty years of experience of working with
women with disabilities to construct fictionalized accounts of the
vocational rehabilitation experiences of women. This collection of short
fiction highlights the economic, psychological, attitudinal, and
systemic challenges that women with disabilities experience as they
attempt to enter or re-enter the paid work force. The stories cover a number of themes: self-confidence and relationship to reality is
undermined without the authentication of a disability; the prevalence of
abuse, both as the etiology of a disability and the vulnerability for
abuse for a women with a disability; the interconnections between abuse
dynamics and vocational development patterns; the impact of the social
construct of women as caregivers; income support polices that contribute
to the feminization of poverty; negative societal attitudes toward
women and the resulting lack of support; and gender bias in career
counselling. These accounts are intended to challenge and transform the
rehabilitation praxis.
E-Mail: Jody Hawley, Ph.D., CCRC, White Rock, Canada
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