Lily Cannon

Lily Cannon

            In chapter 12, Women With Disabilities by Rhoda Olkin, she discusses the discrimination that women have with disabilities. Throughout the chapter Olkin discusses the similarities and differences between the women’s and disability rights movements. As the author she tells us the readers that she has polio, which limits her mobility and has an increase of fatigue. She wanted to point out that “many people wear the gender hat, but usually I am the only one in the room wearing the disability hat. I’m forced to be the disability spokesperson, advocate, and educator” (p192). Olkin says that both women and people with disabilities have pressure to conform to majority norms in other words “many women initially wanted to be more like men, until the idea that women’s values, abilities, skills, and methods were different but equally valuable gained prominence. Similarly, most of disability rehabilitation is founded on the idea of making people with disabilities function as much as possible as people without disabilities. Society puts great value on overcoming the disability.” This similarity between women’s and disability rights movement I believe is true and I also agree with the last statement that society does put great value on overcoming a disability. Basically society thinks that its in your best interest to overcome your disability but in some cases it just isn’t possible. You are in away frowned upon. In this chapter she also discusses the dating side when one has a disability. It was noted the “most people indicate that they would not marry a person with a disability” (p196) and that “women with disabilities are least likely to be married” (p196). Although this may sound harsh it is the truth. These facts brought out about dating and marrying one with a disability reminds me of the movie Love and Other Drugs it describes a relationship between a women who has Parkinson’s and a normal young guy with so much to look forward to in life. The normal figure in these relationships might feel like they always have a weight on their shoulders that they cant get rid of.

            On the other hand in “Stigma Management”, Taub discusses men with disabilities. The purpose of this paper was to “explore how sport and physical activity lessens the devaluation of men with physical disabilities.” (1474) I believe that it’s very interesting how men use athletics to help cope with their disability because when I think of athletics one word that comes to mind is strength and masculinity. I can relate to this paper because all throughout high school I participated in unified sports, which was an extracurricular activity where we would work with disabled students through sports. Watching them pursue these sports made me look up to them. Although they weren’t all males it just again proves a similarity between females and males with disabilities that they both use sports to counter for their disabilities.

            In the final article “PMS as a Culture-Bound Syndrome” by Joan Chrisler, she discusses PMS and what society knows and thinks of it. Chrisler says the definition of PMS is “a variety of physiological and psychological changes that have been associated with phases of the menstrual cycle” (155). Chrisler wants to get across that PMS is certainly not a disease but can be categorized as an illness. A question brought up in this chapter is why has PMS become so significant? Chrisler believes that “the existence of PMS encourages women to think of themselves as unstable and potentially ill for at least half of each month. It encourages men to think of us that way, too, which limits our opportunities for self-expression and career advancement” (165-166). When she brings up men’s opinions on this I believe many women can relate. For example, this may not be in a work area, but whenever my dad believes my mom is moody or hostile he immediately assumes she is on her period. They come up with excuses for us as women for being in a bad mood when they don’t need an excuse to when they’re short-tempered. This is just a smaller picture with in the huge image of society that men are treated differently than women.