There are real-world, devastating consequences for disabled women marginalised by the kinds of attitudes that deny them full agency over what happens to their bodies.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I watch 'Mad Men' and I see the patronising attitudes to women that are so shocking for all of us to watch now, I feel that I've lived and see the same evolution in this regard around disability.
It's undeniable that what we are taught as a culture to believe about disability is at odds with traditional notions of masculinity.
A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man's advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.
For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire.
Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature.
When you hear the word 'disabled,' people immediately think about people who can't walk or talk or do everything that people take for granted. Now, I take nothing for granted. But I find the real disability is people who can't find joy in life and are bitter.
I don't see myself as disabled. There's nothing I can't do that able-bodied athletes can do.
When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I've got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.
The world worries about disability more than disabled people do.
I use the term 'disabled people' quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses.