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LITERARY DISABILITY STUDIES

Dramatizing
Blindness
Disability Studies as
Critical Creative Narrative
Devon Healey
 Literary Disability Studies

Series Editors
David Bolt
Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool, UK

Elizabeth J. Donaldson
New York Institute of Technology
Old Westbury, NY, USA

Julia Miele Rodas

Bronx Community College
City University of New York
Bronx, NY, USA
Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the
exploration of literature and literary topics from a disability studies
perspective. Focused on literary content and informed by disability
theory, disability research, disability activism, and disability experience,
the Palgrave Macmillan series provides a home for a growing body of
advanced scholarship exploring the ways in which the literary imagination
intersects with historical and contemporary attitudes toward disability.
This cutting edge interdisciplinary work includes both monographs and
edited collections (as well as focused research that does not fall within
traditional monograph length). The series is supported by an edito-
rial board of internationally-­recognised literary scholars specialising in
disability studies:

Michael Bérubé, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature, Pennsylvania

State University, USA
G. Thomas Couser, Professor of English Emeritus, Hofstra University in
Hempstead, New York, USA
Michael Davidson, University of California Distinguished Professor,
University of California, San Diego, USA
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor of Women’s Studies and English,
Emory University, Atlanta, USA
Cynthia Lewiecki-­Wilson, Professor of English Emerita, Miami University,
Ohio, USA.

For information about submitting a Literary Disability Studies book

proposal, please contact the series editors: David Bolt (boltd@hope.
ac.uk), Elizabeth J. Donaldson (edonalds@nyit.edu), and/or Julia Miele
Rodas (Julia.Rodas@bcc.cuny.edu).

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14821
 Devon Healey

Dramatizing
Blindness
Disability Studies as Critical Creative
Narrative
Devon Healey
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, Canada

Literary Disability Studies

ISBN 978-3-030-80810-5    ISBN 978-3-030-80811-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80811-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 For my oil spot
For Nate
For Marylin and Gerald
For Erin
For Rod and Tanya
 Acknowledgements

The writing of this book began as nothing more than a midday conversa-
tion with Rod Michalko that continued into the evening over cocktails.
This conversation continued to take shape through the laughter and tears
shared among my family, friends and colleagues as we all, together, began
to see through blind eyes. There is nothing more precious in life than our
imaginations and I want to thank those who shared theirs with me, who
stirred my imagination and who, with generosity and grace, imagined
blind eyes with me. It is to these people I owe an incredible debt of
gratitude.
I want to especially thank David Bolt for his support and belief in this
book and Ben Whitburn for his comments, support and laughter.
Words cannot express how truly grateful I am to both Tanya Titchkosky
and Rod Michalko. Their generosity of spirit, their guidance and their
friendship made writing this book not only possible but also a life-­
changing experience. I am forever grateful to Tanya Titchkosky who
showed me the poetics, beauty and wonder in disability studies. I am
especially indebted to Rod Michalko who spent countless hours over the
phone and in-person working through ideas, editing and imagining this
work with me. Thank you, Rod, for being not only my mentor and friend
but also my guide into the beauty that is blindness.

vii
viii Acknowledgements

The main character of this work is named after my sister, Erin Healey.
Erin is a strong, intelligent and passionate woman who has and continues
to be a constant source of love, energy, laughter and inspiration in my
life. Her presence flows through all of the pages of this book.
And, I am deeply grateful to my grandmother, Annie Morton, who
through her life with Macular Degeneration, showed me how seeing dif-
ferently is both a powerful and a graceful way of being in the world.
To my parents, Gerald and Marylin Healey, I am especially indebted
and grateful. It is impossible to truly express how much you both mean
to me. The impact that you have had on and continue to have in my life
is equally impossible to express.
Thank you, Dad, for filling my days with laughter, stories and music.
My desire to find the beauty in everyday life, to engage genuinely with
others and to always be true to myself comes from you. The creative,
emotional and inquisitive way you live your life is throughout the pages
of this book.
Mum, thank you for moving into blindness with me, for being blind,
with me. Although you may not see the way I do, I knew then that you
were right there with me, feeling it, and still now, I know you are in it
with me.
And finally, to my partner in life, love and in blindness, Nate Bitton,
this book would not have been imaginable without you. You embraced
my blindness long before I ever could. You have shown me how to be an
artist, how to create and how to listen to the world in new ways. Thank
you for holding my hand, for laughing and crying with me and for being
a part of every word on every page of this work. I love you.
 Praise for Dramatizing Blindness

“In dramatizing blindness, Devon Healey raises the curtain on blindness, reveal-
ing a creative potential rarely, if ever, seen. In five acts, Healey re-moves blind-
ness from the wings of the stage of everyday life, placing it center stage and
relegating the culture of sight to its rightful place as backdrop. Read this book.”
—Rod Michalko, PhD author of The Mystery of the Eye and the Shadow
of Blindness (1998); The Two in One: Walking with Smokie,
Walking with Blindness (1999); The Difference that Disability
Makes (2002); and Things are Different Here (2017)

“In this triumphant merging of disability and drama, Blindness takes centre
stage, offering a unique and unputdownable text that will be essential reading to
anyone with an interest in the human condition.”
—Dan Goodley, Professor of Disability Studies
and Education, University of Sheffield, UK

“Disability dramatics have constituted a problematic cultural presence for cen-

turies. Many of those terrible traditions are subverted by Dr. Healey in this truly
original and deeply informed engagement with the literary representation of
blindness.”
—David Bolt, Director of the Centre for Culture &
Disability Studies, Liverpool Hope University, UK

“Through a ‘theatre of the eyes,’ Devon Healey sets the stage to witness the
drama of our own self-understanding, moving us to imagine blindness differ-
ently. In a profound artistic engagement with her own blindness, Healey nar-
rates everyday life so as bring the reader in touch with the meaning of blindness
as creative encounter.”
—Tanya Titchkosky, Professor, Department of Social Justice Education,
OISE, University of Toronto, Canada, and author of Disability, Self
and Society (2003), Reading and Writing Disability Differently (2007),
and The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning (2011)
“This book adds to the growing cannon of blindness studies and charts new ter-
ritory in disability life-writing. Devon Healey explores the many ways that
blindness is performed and perceived in everyday life with her keen observations
of the nuanced and overlapping narratives of disability that affect both the actor
and the audience. The five acts of this drama are by turn theoretical and playful,
deeply personal and acutely aware of the world beyond the self.”
—Georgina Kleege, Professor of English, University of California,
Berkeley, USA

“Adjusting to vision loss as a subject often lacks an exploration of the nuance. It’s
so much more than what was lost. Examining the experience through a creative
lens allows us to see blindness as opportunity. What a refreshing concept. As a
producer of a podcast geared to those adjusting to becoming Blind, I find the
author’s approach exciting and integral in any conversation about Blindness,
especially for those new to the experience.”
—Thomas Reid, Host & Producer, Reid My Mind Radio

“Dramatizing Blindness is a smart, creative, and thought-provoking experimen-

tal memoir that pushes past old stereotypes of blind people as pitiful. It invites
sighted and blind readers alike to consider factors other than a medical condi-
tion as forces to be reckoned with.”
—Catherine Kudlick, Professor of History and Director, Paul K. Longmore
Institute on Disability San Francisco State University, USA
 Contents

Introduction  1
Blindness as Performance and Performer    5
Exploring the Extraordinary Pathways of Ordinary Performances
of Blindness   9
The Interpretations of Normal Variation   14
Disability Studies, Resistance and Ontology   17
Dramatizing Blindness  22
References  26

 I: The Genesis of Blindness 29

Act
Theoretical Intermission  58
References  66

 II: The School of Hard Knocks 67

Act
Theoretical Intermission  92
References  97

 III: Blindness in the Street 99

Act
Theoretical Intermission  107
References 114

xi
xii Contents

 IV: At Home by Myself with You117

Act
Theoretical Intermission  127
References 134

Act V: The Spectre of a Home137


Conclusion: Awaiting the Arrival of Blindness159
Whose Blindness Is It Anyway?  161
The Manyness of Blindness  163
The Feel of Blindness  166
Reflexive Influence  167
References 168

Index169
 Introduction

How we think of blindness follows from how we imagine it and how we

reimagine it follows from what we think of it. Thinking of blindness as
the lack of sight means that we can close our eyes, imagine it and suddenly
know what it is; we attempt to walk around the room with eyes wide shut
and suddenly we know how blindness feels. We imagine blindness as
what we know, and what we know is what we imagine.
Imagination then, both informs and is informed by routine sets of
actions—look, a blind person1—that illustrates beliefs—nothing to see,
anyway—we and our imaginings function within a socially “pre-scripted”
existence. Is blindness really what we think it to be if blindness is caught
up in our pre-scripted imaginary? Perhaps this question is what can urge
us to “look into” blindness.
Looking into the pre-scripted life of blindness might reveal blindness
as a doing, a choreography of actions, movements and phrases that make
up a performance that both shows and tells blindness. The show and tell
of blindness is not a given but rather, to borrow from Judith Butler

1
This is akin to Frantz Fanon’s (1967) Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 5: The Fact of Blackness
“Look, a Negro!” (p. 84). It does a similar kind of interactional work in relation to blindness as
Fanon’s phrase does in relation to blackness.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

D. Healey, Dramatizing Blindness, Literary Disability Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80811-2_1
2 D. Healey

(1997), “an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted

through a stylized repetition of acts” (p. 402). If Butler is right and “the
body comes to bear cultural meanings” (1997, p. 403), then blindness is
performed under the direction of the imaginings of what sight thinks it
knows blindness to be.
There are, of course, many stories of blindness and its people in the
world. I want to speak of a particularly intriguing one, The Country of the
Blind by H.G. Wells (1904). This is a fictional account of a country
populated exclusively with blind people. Wells’s is a story that imagines a
particular kind of blindness together, alone with itself, a blindness without
sight. It is here, in this imagined country, where blindness not only lives
but flourishes without its antithesis. This story differs from other stories
of blindness since it is born of blindness itself and not of sight in the sense
that Wells’s population of blind people came about through a genetic
condition that, over the generations, made everyone in the country blind.
This is a story that draws on the understanding that eyes either see or
do not. Although Wells’s story is fiction, an imagined community, the
people are real. They are real insofar as blind people exist, fictional or not.
Countries of the blind, in contrast, are strictly fictional. The realness of
the blind people in the story, however, is imagined as if they do not exist
outside of what Wells and his sighted readers imagine them to be. The
author and reader imagine both a blind community and blind people
whereas I, for the purposes of this work, imagine only a blind community.
Blind people are real even as they are given life in a fictional community.
This marks the problem of the ontology of blindness—real blind people
imagining a community of blindness.
Before blindness became real to me, I thought I knew what it was. I
closed my eyes and thought—“so this is blindness.” I was, of course,
profoundly wrong. The conceptions I had of blindness became real to me
only once I began to see through my blind eyes. I became aware that
allowing my eyelids to fall over my eyes does not represent blindness at
all. In fact, it does not represent anything other than just that, eyelids
over the eyes. But, for those who do not see through blind eyes, blindness
is just that—a falling eyelid as a lack of sight, darkness. This either/or
relation to the eye sets the stage for some contentious interactions between
eyes that see, eyes that do not and eyes that are still looking for either or
 Introduction 3

both. Blindness is not an open-and-shut case, and yet, it is often imagined

as such. And, this imaginary is very real for blind people.
Eyes open—sight; eyes shut—blindness. Eyes open with sight—active;
eyes shut with blindness—inactive. This either/or relation to the eyes is
conceived of and nurtured by our “social imaginary.” This imaginary, as I
conceive of it, is reminiscent of culture. Beliefs, customs, traditions,
folklore and the like are produced through, in and by stories. These stories
told and retold mingle with each other, wrapping and tying themselves
together, details lost or gained along the way that eventually, identifying
the original story would be impossible, unimaginable even. This is our
social imaginary, only the stories told and retold take shape through the
social institutions that make up our everyday lives.
Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs (2013) tell us,

Social institutions are necessarily human inventions, their particular func-

tions are inevitably invested with symbolic meaning that makes sense of
their functioning within the broader structures of society. Taking a struc-
turalist position […] social institutions
can only be understood through the organisation or network of signifi-
ers and signified that is held within the social imaginary. (p. 369)

“Human inventions” are stories that are imagined and told by us to help
create, organize and give meaning to our lives. Yet, the stories we imagine
and tell do not signify or represent the fullness of the societies in which
we live. The stories that are crystallized into social institutions reflect the
dominant narrators, who and what they represent (signifier), and to
whom they are narrating (signified).
We tell stories of the eyes every day, for example. They are symbolic of
intelligence, allowing us to see the point; intimacy, love at first sight;
spirituality, eyes as the windows to the soul; authority and power, I can
see right through you; in Western culture of truth and honesty, look me
in the eye; and of ability, I can see that. It is not difficult to imagine
everyday stories and thus everyday practices that reflect such symbolic
meaning. And so, in a world of sight to be seen as legitimate, sight is
implied. “The social imaginary [then] refers to the necessary as well as the
dissimilatory,” say Gilleard and Higgs, “and the transient as well as the
4 D. Healey

permanent network of meanings that make a society a society” (p. 370).

To be blind; to live blind; this is to live among a myriad of stories of
blindness and of sight. It is also to live among blindness narrated and
imagined as unimaginable. This unimaginable is to imagine blindness as
wholly unexpected, as shocking in its anticipation and as bewildering in
its appearance. This is what I mean by the social imaginary—stories,
whether of blindness or of sight, that imagine both what is imaginable
and what is unimaginable.
Stories of eyes that see become stories of what it is to be human and
this, for blind people, erases any ontological potential. If, as Thomas King
(2003) says, “the truth about stories is that that is all we are” (p. 2) and
sighted stories are what make up our imaginary, then where does this
leave blindness?
Karen Gagne (2007) takes up the work of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia
Wynter in relation to the human noting that “our present culture’s purely
biological definition of what it is to be, and therefore of what it is like to
be, human” (p. 253) limits the potential of our social imaginary. The
stories we tell become the stories we live and the stories we live become
performances of values and beliefs we often did not realize we possessed.
Do we really believe, as H.G. Wells wrote, “in the country of the blind, the
one-eyed man is king?” (1904). Do we really believe that blindness is darkness
and to live with such darkness is not human? Perhaps. Still, there is always-­
already present in the story told the makings of a new story—each script
bears the seed of a subscript. This new or yet untold story provides the
release of a poetics, an “action by which humans work to create themselves
anew” (Gagne 2007, p. 258). This sense of a poetics is how I conceive of
the social imaginary and how I exist within it … as a blind person. In this
work, I hope to join the ranks of those many storytellers who tell the
stories that sighted eyes, neither one nor two, cannot see.
In the pages that follow, the stories of the eyes will be told, retold and
engaged by blindness. As is the case of the role of eyes in any story, my
blind eyes become the narrator and lead performer in this production; a
journey on the path to discovering how blindness came to be imagined
and how we might reimagine its being. This journey begins with a story
of my blind eyes attempting to be seen in the current social imaginary
thus releasing a poetics of the eyes. Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical
 Introduction 5

model will serve as an approach to understanding this “release” and how

it is performed in everyday life. Experience alone cannot be the only way
that the being of blindness may be discovered. If it were, then eyes would
not be relational—they would not depend on the insights of others. This
is, of course, unimaginable since eyesight is always asking if some other
eyes saw what they did. “Did you see that? Am I seeing things?”
And so, with medicine draped in the costumes of auto-ethnography,
disability studies and Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, the curtain
rises, revealing the stage upon which everyday life is performed. This
stage has been home to many performances, influencing the ways we
imagine and relate to and with each other; a stage whose front and back
disappears with the movement of actors, a choreography that belies any
sense of direction. Blindness will take the stage when the house lights go
down and the curtain rises.

Blindness as Performance and Performer

Fundamentally, then, this book is committed to working through the
conception of blindness as a doing or, in Goffman’s (1959) terms, as a
“performance” and, in Butler’s (1997) terms, as “performativity.” At first
blush, these three ideas—doing, performance and performativity—seem
the same. In some sense, this is true. Doing, performing and the idea of
performativity sound as though they are signifying the same phenomenon.
But, while the three do reference a similar phenomenon, they do so from
slightly different angles, or to use theatrical vocabulary, from slightly
different blocking, thus providing a multi-perspective understanding of
the performed phenomenon. This phenomenon is culture, everyday life
and all of its features, including blindness.
First, I will explicate Butler’s version of performativity as it relates to
blindness. Following this, I will demonstrate how the work of Erving
Goffman provides a basis for understanding blindness not only as
performance but as theatrical performance. This allows me to explore my
sense of blindness as a doing, as a theatrical doing in the sense that it must
be played out on the stage of everyday life and, as William Shakespeare
6 D. Healey

says, “the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”
(Act II, Scene II, 1679–1680).
As I said earlier, there is a pre-script (image/imaginary) of blindness
and this script is written, for the most part, by sight. And yet, this pre-­
script needs to be rewritten (reimagined) into another script, the one to
be acted out on the stage of life. The cast of this play is made up of people
everywhere, citizens of all places; it includes all those who live in the
midst of the absence and presence of sight, of sights and of site. The
playwright, or the King in Shakespeare’s terms, of this play has written
this script only from the point of view of sight of the King and it is the
play, the style that catches the King’s conscience. But, it is the theatre of
blindness that gives sight an opportunity to examine itself and what it has
written blindness to be. Where is this theatre of blindness? This is one of
the questions that animates this work. The theatre of blindness while
particular in its location—the life of blind people—is also generally
located. The life of blind people is inevitability lived in the midst of
sighted others. It is this inevitability that makes the theatre of blindness
so precarious both in its location and in its performance. Therefore, even
though one of the animating questions of this work may be, where is the
theatre of blindness?, the inevitability of the journey and the search for it
may be unending. And yet, as I search, as a blind woman, for this theatre,
I find myself always-already in it and always-already performing. In a
sense, it is the performance I explore.
As Butler (1997) says, “[t]o do, to dramatize, to reproduce, these seem
to be some of the elementary structures of embodiment” (p. 404). These,
too, are the “elementary structures” of the embodiment of the conventional
understanding of blindness. In order to explore the structures of blind-
ness, we must first examine what these structures, these performances,
these doings are based on. This is what I am calling the pre-script.
I begin with the premise that the fundamental structure of blindness is
sight; that is the pre-script. The script of blindness is written and
performed on the basis of the structure of sight.2 Basically, in the theatre
2
David Bolt (2018) refers to this process as “ocular centrism.” He says, “If ocular centrism is
thought of as the baseline of assumptions, the very foundation of the meta-narrative of blindness
perhaps, then this neologism ocular normativism denotes the effect: the perpetuation of the con-
clusion that the supreme means of perception is necessarily visual” (p. 14). By this, Bolt is showing
 Introduction 7

of everyday life, blindness is treated as the opposite of sight and, there-

fore, sight may be understood as the pre-script of blindness. We rarely
imagine blindness as anything other than what we know it to be, and
even more seldomly do we question this knowledge of sight as something
to be imagined. How is it that sight has been afforded the role of author,
of playwright? Does sight come before blindness? Did we get the order
wrong? Or, have we taken for granted sight understood as a natural
biological phenomenon and blindness as an unnatural one?
We understand sight as a given, we treat it, embody it, as natural and
thus as given, as biological, a product of itself outside of interpretation.
In order for blindness to be performed on any stage, then, be it a theatre
stage, the stage of life, etc., the performance needs to embody the lack of
sight. Without this, what would be performed is not blindness, but sight.
Any script of blindness requires sight understood as a given, as a taken-­
for-­granted reality, as a pre-script. The script of blindness is written and
performed on the basis of the implicit, at times explicit, performance of
the absence of sight. The presence of blindness in a conventional sense is
simultaneously nothing more and nothing less than the absence of sight.
For Goffman (1959), the notion of performance goes beyond “ele-
mentary structures of embodiment.” It is, rather, the taken-for-­granted
theatre of everyday life. If Goffman is right and “ life itself is a dramati-
cally enacted thing” (p. 70), then there is potential to reimagine the pre-
scripted performance of blindness as something other than what sight the
King has made of it. And, what sight the King has made of blindness is,
recalling Rod Michalko (2002), sight gone missing. The potential for
blindness to enact its own drama, its own theatre of the eyes, to write its
own script, as Goffman might say, allows for the exploration of a blind
ontology—one that is not understood as embodied absence but as a pres-
ence that is its own. It may be true, as Goffman himself says, that “[a]ll
the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t
are not easy to specify” (1959, p. 70). And so, in anticipation of perhaps
specifying the unease of what is crucial about blindness, it is with

how all scripts, including the script of blindness, are written from the point of view (pre-­script) of
sight understood as not only the dominant way of knowing, but of perceiving as well. Ocular cen-
trism, then, generates a certain kind of blindness, a “sighted-blindness,” so to speak. This script is
what requires inquiry and exploration.
8 D. Healey

Goffman’s dramaturgical model that I intend to “look into” the theatrical

life of blindness.
“It seems to me,” says Goffman, “that the dramaturgical approach may
constitute a fifth perspective, to be added to the technical, political,
structural, and cultural perspectives” (1959, p. 240). This “fifth
perspective” is embodied within the writings of William Shakespeare
who dramatized everyday life into timeless five act plays whose characters
and storylines continue to be performed on the many stages of life. This
book will take up the themes of Goffman and Shakespeare yielding a
dramatization of blindness imagined in five acts. The “fifth perspective”
looks at the many ways in which blindness is enacted in everyday life
since, as already mentioned, “the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the King” (Shakespeare, Act II, Scene II, 1679–1680).
One of the goals of this work is also to capture the conscience of the
King. It is to demonstrate that the King, understood here as sight, does
indeed write the script not only of itself but of blindness as well, and it is
to capture the conscience that gave rise to the scripts of both blindness
and sight. It is to show, too, that sight is responsible and should have a
conscience regarding this responsibility. With these goals as guides, this
book will proceed in five acts, each of which will depict a representative
of the King of sight.
Capturing the conscience of the King of sight is no easy matter; it
requires a method that first captures the King’s attention. This is why I
choose to understand theatre and drama as themselves methods of
inquiry.3 Together with auto-ethnography, methods in disability studies
and phenomenology, I stage theatre and drama as the location of my
method for capturing both the attention and the conscience of the King
of sight.
And, why five acts? In some sense, it is arbitrary since representatives
of sight are everywhere matching the ubiquity of the scenes of sight itself.
However, I am choosing what I take to be the five more prevalent

3
Theatre and Drama understood as method are similar to and are a part of what has come to be
known as narrative inquiry (Couser 1997, 2009, 2011; Mitchell and Snyder 2001; Titchkosky and
Michalko 2014). My method borrows heavily from narrative inquiry, but introduces theatre and
drama as a particular methodological twist based on the work of theorists such as Goffman
and Butler.
 Introduction 9

representatives of blindness in contemporary Western culture, namely,

medicine, education, everyday life, the self and the philosophical question
of blindness as an identity. Together, with the fact that all of Shakespeare’s
plays are given to us in five acts, is the reason for my writing Dramatizing
Blindness in five acts. Now that I have briefly discussed the overall
orientation of this book, let me move to a more detailed explication of
my particular approach. This will involve a depiction of a blend of theory
and method that will reveal the meaning and goals of my theatrical
exploration of blindness.

 xploring the Extraordinary Pathways

E
of Ordinary Performances of Blindness
This work is, for the most part, a play, a story. Even though it is true, and
even though it bears both methodological and theoretical reflections, it
remains a story. This work isn’t the actual event of blindness; it is a story
of the event and so, it is not fiction. We each have seen this play, heard it,
in one way or another, before. It is the play of blindness and, as such, it is
a story that makes sense. It makes sense because it is believable and it is
believable because we have heard it before, and if we have heard it before,
then it has, likely, happened.
The reappearance of a happening in the form of a performance and a
story becomes ordinary in that storytelling is a part of everyday life. You
might be outraged by this story, astonished by its events, bewildered by
its telling or find it to be quite mundane—normal even. Regardless, each
of these responses and many more like them are interpretations of events
and performances that constitute the stage of everyday life. Our responses
to performances and stories are, in large part, derivative of these constative
social processes. As Alfred Schutz (1970) puts it, “only a very small part
of my knowledge of the world originates with my personal experience.
The greater part is socially derived, handed down to me by my friends,
my parents, my teachers and the teachers of my teachers” (Schutz &
Wagner, p. 96). This knowledge derived from personal experience and
from that which is handed down is interpreted in the form of responses,
10 D. Healey

some of which are banal in character such as agreement, while others are
more visceral such as outrage. All responses to and interpretations of
knowledge are in some ways the affect of knowledge itself. Knowledge,
then, is through and through social in that it is a derivative of the ways in
which we live in relation with one another including in relation to those
who came before us and to those who will come after us.
Stories of “knowledge of the world” told, heard, retold and collected
over time make up what we perceive to be expected, normal and
unexpected, or not normal. Expectations and even anticipations are
framed by this knowledge and are made sense of through the stories
derived from it. Schutz refers to these collected stories as a “stock of
knowledge” (Schutz and Wagner 1970, p. 74). He says,

Man [sic] in daily life … finds at any given moment a stock of knowledge
at hand that serves him as a scheme of interpretation of his past and present
experiences, and also determines his anticipations of things to come. This
stock of knowledge has its particular history. It has been constituted in and
by previous experiencing activities of our consciousness, the outcome of
which has now become our habitual possession. (Schutz and Wagner
1970, p. 74)

It is our “stock of knowledge” that makes our stories, including plays,

tellable, hearable thus sensible. For example, the contemporary
understanding of blindness, one shared globally, frames it as a medical
problem. Indeed, this is the dominant way of framing blindness and it is
played and replayed on the stage of everyday life and it is a story that is
told and retold on that same stage. It is sensible. One response to the
medical story of blindness is, “I should see an eye doctor,” or “Have you
seen an eye doctor?” These responses are derivative of our stock of
knowledge regarding both blindness and sight. They represent a relation
not only between blindness and sight, but also a relation among all of us
who participate in everyday life. Indeed, it is a coming together of all of
us equipped with our collected and collective stock of knowledge that
provides for the sensibility of the story of blindness as a medical problem.
As I said earlier, this story may outrage us, it may make us laugh, cry;
we may have all of these responses and all of them spring from our stock
of knowledge. It is this stock of knowledge that provides not only for the
 Introduction 11

medical interpretation of blindness but for all other interpretations as

well. Conventional interpretations of blindness are very difficult to
disrupt since the knowledge we have collected about blindness and our
subsequent responses to it become, as Schutz (1970) says, “habitual.”
Habits, also a part of our stock of knowledge, are, as we know, difficult to
break. Ironically, we can develop stories, in my case a book, that make use
of our stock-of-blindness-knowledge to disrupt that same knowledge and
our “knowledge-habit.” Our stories may be told so as to reflect the
knowledge of blindness that is implicitly invoked by those responding to
it as a way to make sense of it. Hearing echoes of our stories as they are
retold in a different form may allow us to attend to the taken-for-granted
character of our habitual stories. This work is written with the intent of
retelling the story of blindness—one that may, just may—be disruptive.
Whatever the case, I want to emphasize the power and influence that
our stock of knowledge of blindness possesses. We all operate with some
definition of blindness and it is this definition that influences and shapes
our responses to it, whether we are blind or sighted. Of such definitions,
Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko (2009) remind us that,

Everyone operates with some definition of disability [blindness] whether

we realize it or not. Thus, whatever else disability [blindness] is, it is
something that people define, understand, and come to know and live with
in particular ways. Virtually no one in contemporary Western culture is
without some sense of what disability [blindness] is; thus, no one is without
some thoughts or feelings about it. (p. 2)

If everyone was without a definition of blindness, there would be no

blindness. And yet, we are with definitions of blindness and we have
thoughts and feelings about it. For sighted others, though, these
definitions, thoughts and feelings are directed towards others—blind
others. Sight allows for the understanding that while sighted others are
not without thoughts and feelings of blindness, they are without
blindness. This book intends to point to this understanding of blindness;
it intends to demonstrate that even though we might conceive of ourselves
as without blindness, we are wholly with it in that we participate in the
construction of its meaning and of its feel. Thus, we, all of us, blind and
sighted, are actors in the theatre of blindness.
12 D. Healey

Knowledge is not the only thing that makes up our stock of knowledge
about blindness, we also feel it and this emotional relation to it reflects,
as Megan Boler (1999) says, “the complex dynamics of one’s lived
situation” (p. 2). Our “lived situation” is made in and of a culture whose
stock of knowledge tells us that blindness is not a good thing, it is not
something that we typically aspire to or yearn for. Blindness is commonly
understood as over there, as something belonging (embodied) to and by
someone else, as something that we do not want to embody. And so, our
thoughts, feelings and emotions reflect this. We avoid blindness and stay
firmly seated in the theatre of sight. We might say that sight, along with
the conventional definitions of blindness it generates, represents, to
borrow from Boler, “[an] invisible conformity to the status quo” (1999,
p. 2). Understanding ourselves as without blindness is a commitment to
such a conformity, invisible as it is, to sight as status quo. It may be that
such a commitment grounds the activity of passing as sighted. But, no
one is without blindness since blindness is the antithesis of our imagined
and desired selves; it is a something that we want no part of.
“Down in front, I can’t see!” “Poor seats, bad sightlines.” Expressions
such as these are ubiquitous in our culture. They suggest that “seeing” is
the privileged position of knowledge and experience and they suggest
that any obstruction to such a privilege be eradicated. In a more serious
way, blurry vision, floaters, double vision—all of these are instances of a
threat to the privileged position of sight. “Did you hear? Her brother
went blind!” “Oh, no!” These expressions show how even the news of
blindness evokes a sense of horror.
Blindness, in this sense, is not usually understood as something per-
sonal; it is something that happens to a friend of a friend. It is a story on
the news (not about us); it is an accident of birth (not of ours); it is a
patient in the hospital (not me); it is the one for whom the universal sign
of access means something (not to me); it is that woman on the street
with a cane (white or otherwise) (not me). It is disability; it is “one in
seven Canadians aged fifteen years or older […] 14% of the Canadian
population […] 3.8 million individuals” (Canadian Survey on
Disability, 2012).
But, it is certainly not us.
 Introduction 13

We think of blindness as something so removed that when it begins to

creep into our life, we pull storied-experiences from our stock of
knowledge to rationalize our way out of it. When, for example, our sight
begins to change, as will likely happen as we age (even to us), we respond
in ordinary, even expected, everyday ways. We wear glasses that are
fashionable to distract from our changing-sight, place contact lenses over
our eyeballs to mask our changing-sight, share laughter about being blind
as bats to make light of our changing-sight and, of course the most
rational thing of all, “my sight won’t change any more than it has, it will
stay right here.” And, “In [each] cas[e] it is the stock of knowledge at
hand that serves as the scheme of interpretation for the actually emergent
experience” (Schutz and Wagner 1970, p. 75).
In this sense, sight (eyes that function “normally”) becomes the equally
normal ready-at-hand way of interpreting the world. We then interpret
our bodies in the world as capable of moving within a variation of normal
sight (the need for glasses, contacts, etc.). “We operate within an implicit
conception of a ‘normal range’ of variation or difference,” say Titchkosky
and Michalko, “[a] little trouble seeing or a little trouble hearing, for
example, are usually thought of as normal differences; but blindness or
deafness is another matter” (2009, p. 5). When this normal variation
understood as a “scheme of interpretation” is applied to blindness, it
(blindness) is made into a problem, a problem belonging to that individual,
a failure of that individual’s sight and not a problem or a failure of our
stock of knowledge.
Our stock of knowledge remains firm, unchanged and any variation in
it stems from what we emphasize when we face situations we may
interpret and experience as new. Experiencing diminishing sight, whether
severe or not, may be experienced as something new. Interpreting it,
therefore, requires tacitly consulting our stock of knowledge and
emphasizing one aspect of it over others. This gives us a way to interpret
and make sense of new experiences. For example, interpreting changing-­
sight might lead us to emphasize the biology aspect of our stock of
knowledge—thus we ask questions such as “who in our family has low-­
vision?” which is a way to interpret, know and make sense of blindness.
And yet, much of our stock of knowledge, as implicitly as we invoke it,
may generate some mystery in the way we understand our experiences. I
now explore this mysterious aspect of embodiment.
14 D. Healey

The Interpretations of Normal Variation

Even though we live in our bodies, meaning we inhabit and interpret the
world through the physical manifestation of our selves (bones, flesh, etc.),
our thoughts, feelings, actions and biology are, at times, a mystery to us
(Michalko 1998). We may live in our bodies but we do not know our
bodies; we are told, particularly in Western society that while we
experience our bodies, knowing them remains the purview of those who
are expert in such knowing, for example, biology (human and otherwise)
and its derivatives—medicine with all its variations. We live in a culture
of many experts and professionals, experts and professionals on us.
Medicine, rehabilitation, counselling and education are some of the
“professions” that provide us with expert ways of knowing what to expect,
what is normal, and what not to expect, what is not normal regarding our
bodies. The mystery of our bodies, something we experience from time to
time, is resolved or so the performance of medicine leads us to believe at
least for all practical purposes.
The expected body, the one regarded as normal and natural, is the
accepted body of medical experts. This expectation and acceptance
construct the body not only as normal, but as desirable. The knowledge
of normalcy handed down to us by experts and professionals in the
theatre of medicine shapes the ways in which we interpret and interact
with ourselves and others. This sense of the expected-normal creates, as
Catherine Kudlick says, “environments built on the assumption that
everyone is young, strong, tireless, healthy, of similar size and shape,
independent, and with all physical and mental components and in perfect
working order” (quoted in Titchkosky and Michalko 2009, p. 34). This
is both our expected and accepted normal. This, too, serves to resolve
mysteries in relation to the body. There is nothing mysterious about this
version of normal until it becomes a mystery, until our sight changes, for
example. It is at this point that we seek expertise not only to resolve the
mystery but also to do so by performing a revival of sight on the stage of
everyday life in the theatre of normalcy. Ophthalmologists, rehabilitators,
accommodation experts, adaptive technology experts all work together as
the stage crew of this revival performance. They bring the expert’s script
 Introduction 15

to life on stage demonstrating that “changing-sight” can be adjusted too,

rehabilitated, accommodated and can become “just like” normal sight…
only different. Managing the stage, lighting, building the sets and the rest
is one thing; performing sight and its “normal variation” of changing-sight
is another and is left to those waiting in the wings for their cue to enter.
Waiting in the wings, too, is blindness—not changing-sight, but sight
changed. It, too, is performed on the same stage and performed so that
“change” is not a mystery, but is merely what is missing—sight itself…
unchanged.
Blindness is the character that does not move with sight but away from
it. It “stands” out onstage, visible, as the one removed, as the one alone,
as the one missing, changed. Blindness is the figure onstage that does not
blend in, but that simultaneously draws the attention of sight and away
from sight. Blindness is the leading role that awaits its entrance; for this,
it needs one more change—from sight removed to sight missing.
Removing sight may be a relatively innocent activity. Blindness simulation
exercises demonstrate this.4 Missing sight, in contrast, is not so innocent.
It is sight that should be there, but is not; it is missing. It cannot be
moved back as in the case of simulation, it can only be explained. How
did sight go missing is a question addressed by medicine in contemporary
times. It is this version of blindness, missing sight, that initially takes the
stage as the leading role.
But, blindness may be a diva of sorts especially one with eccentricities.
These actors, this blindness, sometimes resist change. This blindness,
alone in the wings, feels the vibrations from the weighted movement of
sight onstage. It hears the gravitas of many voices speaking as one telling
of sight as the way things are and the way things ought to be. Alone in the
wings, this blindness waits for its cue. It waits for its moment to enter, for
the time in the performance when sight pauses, is silent or asks a question.
Blindness is the character who is constantly waiting in the midst of the
performance of sight, a performance spoken as a monologue—no
dialogue, no room.

4
For an analysis of blindness simulation and its relation to the culture of sight, see Titchkosky,
Healey and Michalko (2019).
16 D. Healey

This blindness, though, grows restless and no longer waits patiently.

With its resistance it asserts itself onstage and demands the focus, a
dialogue performed onstage in the theatre of the eyes. It demands its part.
This is what happens when blindness (without resistance) enters with-
out being called on. Pulling focus away from sight, it is soon consumed
by the many images, sounds and feelings of sight—upstaged by this
manyness, by the performance of sight. Blindness is not the ideal per-
former of sight and it is most definitely not as we like it, since it is merely
like it; it performs sight, not ideally, but as a reasonable facsimile.
Michalko suggests that “the hermeneutic circle, how and what we see
proceed from a community bound in the interplay of persons and
tradition” (1998, p. 74). Blindness enters in the midst of sight’s
performance; it knows the plot of sight but cannot be or partake in its
depiction … except in passing since passing counts as real only on
Shakespeare’s stage. It is in this way that the “hermeneutic circle” of
which Michalko speaks, with its community, its traditions and its people
and the interplay among them get broken. Blindness enters this
community. It does not have interplay; it merely plays in the community,
in its traditions and plays (posses?) as one of its people.
Without resistance, though, blindness enters the hermeneutics of sight
(its community, its people and their interplay) without understanding
that its entrance can mark a break in this circle. This means that the
quintessential problematic of blindness is its lack of self-knowledge.
Blindness only enters the theatre of the eyes (everyday life) if it can in
some way support the performance of sight. It is important to note that
blindness is not and will never be a member of sight, but it does support
it. This is done when blindness “plays along” with the supremely ordinary
plot of sight as the everyday. This playing along is how blindness has
come to be known as lack, limit, tragedy, loss, resilience, exceptionality,
horror, superstition and the rest. This playing along is how blindness may
insert itself into the hermeneutic circle of performance (community,
people, interplay). It may not be the ideal performer but by participating
in the staged-life of sight, blindness is no longer waiting in the wings; it
is required onstage as a supporting role.
This playing along or passing does little if anything to rewrite, create a
new script or even edit the performance of sight. The ontology of
 Introduction 17

blindness generated from this orientation is transformed into an

epistemology. The being of blindness is transformed into knowing what
blindness is and knowing how it should perform (its role) in the theatre
of the eyes. The epistemological plot of blindness “seeks to teach blindness
about sightedness so that it can come to know sightedness and, equally
importantly, so that blindness can come to know itself as the distorted
shadow of sight” (Michalko 1998, p. 87). Blindness is inserted into the
theatre of the eyes as sight’s shadow, playing along to get along.
Now that I have set the stage for Dramatizing Blindness, I will say more
about the perspective of disability studies that I make use of in this work.
Disability studies, as opposed to the medical study of disability, allows for
a more creative understanding of disability, including blindness, and its
creative potential.

Disability Studies, Resistance and Ontology

For the most part in the contemporary West, blindness is interpreted, at
least initially, from a medical perspective. Those of us who experience
changing-sight, for example, experience this change in relation to
something wrong with the eyes, something medically wrong. In contrast,
disability studies, in response to the medical model of disability, provides
for the possibility of understanding and subsequently experiencing
disability not as strictly medical in character, but also as a being. Disability
studies, then, has allowed me to experience and explore the ontology of
my blindness, my identity as blind and the various epistemological
positions regarding blindness offered by my society as a solution to what
it conceives of as the problem of blindness.
Disability studies treats blindness and other disabilities in terms of
both ontology and epistemology. That is its interest in blindness centres
on blindness understood as relational. It stresses both the appearance of
blindness in the world and how it makes an appearance. Its ontology,
then, is understood as emanating from such appearances and from the
relations among people, traditions, structures, technologies and the rest
of the trappings of culture in which such appearances occur. The difficulty
with a focus on relationality in the form of the interactional appearance
18 D. Healey

of blindness is that the being of blindness is formed only interactionally,

constraining the being of blindness as always-already formed in relation
to sight and making blindness its shadow, as Michalko says. This means
that a disability studies perspective on blindness must eventually depart
from blindness’s appearance in the world and orient to the “it” of
blindness, its being. This requires the formation of self-understanding in
the sense that the appearance of blindness is more than meets the eye and
it is this more that needs to be explored. Blindness, in this sense, is more
than appearance. It is also the occasion to explore what appears in the
midst of both its appearing and appearance. In all of its characters,
including me, blindness knows itself/myself as an epistemology in relation
to sight. I am blind but I do not know what it is to be blind; knowing
what I am is not the same as knowing who I am (Michalko 2002, p. 84).
This is why the quintessential problematic of blindness, and perhaps of
all disability, is self-understanding. Cultivating self-understanding may
be a problematic for all of us, but it takes on an especially distinct
character when it comes to blindness and blind people. Thus, how do we
come to understand blindness, namely our self?
Hannah Arendt (2005) tells us that “understanding is unending and
therefore cannot produce final results. It is the specifically human way of
being alive” (2005, p. 308). Cultivating understanding, including self-­
understanding, then, does not come to an end; it is “unending” and, in
this sense, it is a life. “Final results” are impossible if understanding,
including self-understanding, is simultaneously unending and a life. The
self-understanding of blindness, what it is to be blind, can never be final.
It can only be lived. Cultivating self-understanding is, then, “the
specifically human way of being alive” to blindness.
How does disability studies contribute to blindness’s understanding of
itself? Dan Goodley (2011) tells us that “disability studies are a broad area
of theory, research and practice that are antagonistic to the popular view
that disability equates with personal tragedy” (p. xi). Within this “broad
area” of study, impairment, disability and their everyday appearance and
experience are taken up and made to mean in different ways. Whatever
frame disability studies or any form of inquiry takes will define the
meaning of disability. Disability studies, in whatever way it gets done,
moulds disability so that it fits its particular way of doing disability studies.
 Introduction 19

The Social Model of disability, for example, approaches disability as a

form of oppression and understands impairment and disability as two
separate, but related, occurrences (Davis 1995, 1997; Finkelstein 2001;
Oliver 1990, 1996). The impairment/disability split in the social model
requires impairment to be a static non-changing phenomenon biological
in nature. Disability, in contrast, is required to be subject to the
fluctuations of the society that made it. “Social model scholars turned
attention away from a preoccupation with people’s impairments,” says
Goodley, “to a focus on the causes of exclusion through social, economic,
political, cultural, relational and psychological barriers” (2011, p. 11).
This interpretation prompts society to respond to impairment in ways
that not only include impairment into society (ramps for wheelchair
access, sign language interpreters and voice description) but also render
impairment strictly something that can be attended to and possibly solved.
Disability or disablement happens when society fails to respond appro-
priately to or solve impairment, leaving and/or creating obstructions that
prevent all persons from accessing or participating in the activities of
everyday social life. While this relation to impairment seeks to remove
stigma from the individual, it does not understand itself as a contribution
to understanding disability as something other than society’s failure to
respond appropriately. Finkelstein (2001) notes, “Sadly a lot of people
have come to think of the social model of disability as if it were an
explanation, definition or theory and many people use the model in a
rather sterile formalistic way” (p. 6). Still, to separate impairment from
disability as the social model does, may be read as formulaic and may
even be read as an explanation of how disability came about. This does
more for the epistemology of disability than it does for its ontology. Being
disabled is a different question from how one’s disability occurred.
“Affiliated scholars,” Goodley says, “reject a firm distinction between
impairment and disability because they view biology and culture as
impinging upon one another” (2011, p. 14). In this sense, impairment
and disability are not separate but exist together in and of a society that
works to create, explain and erase them, all at the very same time. This
comes closer to the exploration of disability and ontology.
The work of Bill Hughes (2007), a disability studies scholar working
from the disciplines of political philosophy and phenomenology, can
20 D. Healey

assist greatly in this exploration. The activity of uncovering the ontology

of blindness, and that of most disabilities, seems to be contagious. The
moment disability is revealed as a distinct identity, fleeting as it is,
suddenly becomes the moment everyone is disabled. This moment of
sudden “unity” is underpinned by the notion that humans are inherently
“frail” and “vulnerable” (Hughes 2007, p. 680), each passing moment
bringing them closer to death. This position, of course, eliminates the
possibility of a disability ontology and even the possibility of
minority status.
Hughes puts the matter this way, “[b]ecause disablement ‘is an intrin-
sic feature of the human condition’ it cannot form the basis of minority
group status. Impairment, it seems, is destiny” (2007, p. 675). Hughes
rejects this contagious moment as “post-enlightenment humanism in
which difference disappears into the abstract and disability is eclipsed by
the notion of a common humanity” (2007, p. 677). This can be
understood as the expansion of the theatre of eyes where any difference is
swallowed by the supremely ordinary ensemble cast of this theatre.
This “common humanity” is a common problem of disability. The com-
monality of blindness—we are all losing our vision; “move out of the way,
I can’t see, you are making me blind.” The commonality of physical dis-
ability—we all have aches and pains; we all can’t run/walk/sit/stand all
the time or as we used to. The commonality of… it’s all the same. We all
experience what you do from time to time and in one way or another.
And so, the ontology of blindness is cast to one side in favour of an
epistemology—I know what it’s like. Hughes cautions us, saying that “[i]f
we collapse the particularities of disabled lives into the abstract concept
of humanity we end up claiming that disability does not matter. It is
inconsequential, superfluous in comparison to one’s generic, species
status” (2007, p. 678).5 The effort to create a “common humanity” where,
to borrow from Goodley (2011), “biology and culture” exist together in
a state of friction does not lend itself to a blind ontology. The everyday
“negative ontology of disability and the particularities of prejudice and
oppression tend to reassert themselves” says Hughes (2007, p. 678) thus

5
See Titchkosky (2001) for a more detailed exploration of the concept of “humanity” through
“person-first” language.
 Introduction 21

making disability an ordinary feature of everyday life. To reduce disability

to such an ordinary feature is to diminish, if not eliminate, the prejudice
and oppression of which he speaks. This reductionist perspective removes
disability from any possible social identity to a merely ordinary feature of
the essential frailty and imperfection of any human. Disability studies
joins such endeavours as woman and gender studies, queer studies and
black studies as a form of resistance to the common-sense understanding
that “we are all human” and that “all lives matter.” Exploring the ontology
of disability is crucial to this form of resistance.
“Impairment is the vantage point from which disabled people see the
world and how the world responds,” says Hughes, “[t]heir intersubjective
and inter-corporeal experience is marked, ubiquitously, by ‘felt’ processes
of socio-ontological invalidation” (2007, p. 678). It is this invalidation
that separates the story of non-disability from disability and the story of
sight from blindness. In the theatrical terms used in this work, it is the
narrow line drawn, dividing the quiet darkness of the wings from the
animated spotlight of the stage. This separation is located in the knowledge
that blindness is not sight and is therefore not a part of its story.
Whether we are blind or not, we know what blindness is. The knowl-
edge we have of it is that it is missing sight, a medical problem. The
ontology of blindness is another matter altogether. The “who” or the
“self ” of blindness cannot be gleaned through knowledge alone.
Knowledge of blindness, after all, belongs to everyone. Its ontology,
though, is a belonging that comes through living blindness and an
imaginative engagement with this life.6
But, to whom does blindness belong? It cannot belong to everyone
since the “common humanity” of blindness is not felt by everyone. If it
were, there would be no such commonality. This question can be engaged
only in the exploration of both being blind and the being of blind, an
exploration the remainder of this work embarks upon.
The intersubjective and inter-corporeal relations between disabled and
non-disabled people, in Hughes’s terms, stem from the vantage point of

6
This sentiment may represent the beginnings of a form of inquiry we might call Blind Studies. A
fuller explication of Blind Studies must wait for another time since it is beyond the scope of this
work. Still, this work may be read as an example of Blind Studies.
22 D. Healey

impairment. It is the “felt” experience of impairment of disabled people

and the presumptive and putative sense of impairment experienced by
non-disabled people that socially define their relation. This relation
generates the unity of what Hughes calls the socio-ontological invalidation.
This stems from the conventional understanding rooted in the common
humanity orientation that disability is an invalid “vantage point” from
which to view, understand, know and ultimately experience the world.
This process is what Hughes called a socio-ontological invalidation. It is
this invalidation and its connection to a sense of belonging that I will
explore in the following pages.

Dramatizing Blindness
What follows is my attempt at coming to know blindness and to embark
on an unending journey of understanding it. I incorporate both my
knowledge and understanding of blindness as it initially came to me
through my sight and my experience as a sighted person in this exploration.
This knowledge and understanding is infused with my experience of
blindness. This infusion is not merely a wrinkle in my sense of what and
who I am; it is more a jolt (Berger 1963) that has shaken the foundations
of my taken-for-granted sense of the world and, more dramatically, it has
shaken my taken-for-granted sense of who I am. In the following pages,
I attempt to make use of this jolt, this shattering of my taken-for-granted
sense of sight, as an occasion to explore the version of the self I am now,
now that I am blind.
How blindness makes an appearance in the world, its storied life and
thus its being is often defined by how the medical realm identifies and
knows it to be. The who of blindness (self ) is often identified by the what,
the type of blindness, medical professionals diagnose us as “having.” How
the blind person is then expected to behave and thus live is given to them
via a medical prognosis, an outline of how their medical version of
blindness is likely to behave. In this sense, medicine writes the character
of blindness.
Act I, The Genesis of Blindness, depicts blindness as an ingénue. The
birth, discovery and subsequent growth of this young, both in age and in
 Introduction 23

days blind, character is dramatized through the eyes of Erin, an ingénue

of blindness who is not satisfied with the character medicine has written
her to be. This act marks the beginning of Erin’s journey in blindness and
how she came to discover that blindness is more than meets the medical
eye. A theoretical intermission follows this act and follows each of the
next three acts. The last act, Act V, is more of a creative reflection on
blindness and the entire five acts are followed by a theoretically oriented
conclusion.
The education of Erin, both in blindness and as a graduate student at
the University of Toronto is explored in Act II, The School of Hard Knocks.
The identity or being of blindness is one that is heavily bureaucratized or
to use theatrical terms, scripted. Blindness is not something that is simply
lived; it is an identity written by medicine and as such comes with endless
papers, documents, forms and files to confirm its (Erin’s) identity as blind
and to contextualize its (her) performance on the stage of everyday life.
In this act, the classroom is the stage upon which Erin must navigate and
perform. The tension between the character of blindness written for Erin,
the one students and teachers know and have come to expect from any
and all blind people and the blindness Erin is discovering within herself,
drives this act. This tension is neither easily transcribed into letters for
accommodation from university accessibility services, nor does it fit easily
into a box on a form to register as a disabled student. It is messy; it is
emotional; it is difficult; it is humorous; it is more than a file that follows
a blind person everywhere they go… it is blindness.
The character development of our blind ingénue delves into the per-
formative qualities nurtured through our relations between self and other,
blindness and sight, knowing when and how to be one, both or neither
in Act III, Blindness in the Street. In this act Erin is confronted with the
“reality” that she is visually available to others, a reality that comes to her
clearly through her blindness. The reality that Erin, and indeed all of us,
is visually available to others is a reminder that her blindness gives her. It
is a reminder, too, of the taken-for-granted everyday conception of sight
as the way things are and the way things ought to be. Erin moves through
the streets of her city, Toronto, discovering that there is a rhythm to her
movements. And, she discovers, too, that there is a rhythm to the street.
How these rhythms are written, played, felt and lived is what gives this
24 D. Healey

act an eerie feel through the ghostly vibrations of sight unseen to echo
Georgina Kleege (1999).
In Act IV, At Home by Myself with You, the eyes of Erin turn their gaze
inwards to reveal the watchful presence of her constant companion. Erin’s
eyes serve as both something to be watched by her and at the same time
what watches her. The “you” that Erin is alone with and how she will live
with such a “you” is the question of this act and what serves as the impe-
tus for Act V, The Spectre of a Home.
Act IV reveals the quintessential problematic of blindness through
Erin’s confession that she does not know how to be blind. Act V takes this
philosophical question of blindness as an identity and explores its many
possible answers in the form of a one-act play. In this play Erin sits,
precariously, atop a high bar-like stool on the stage of an empty theatre,
waiting. For whom or for what she is waiting becomes blurry as her wait
is interrupted…
This waiting bears an uncanny resemblance to writing. When we write,
including the writing of this book, we are often interrupted. One of the
things that interrupts us as we write are the voices with which we write.
Many voices enter our writing—theorists, teachers, our experiences and
those of others and, of course, the voice of the author. These voices
sometimes agree with one another and at times disagree; there is often
confusion and conflict among the voices and, from time to time, even
harmony.
My book like all other instances of writing has several voices. There is,
first of all, my voice in the form of life-writing (my experience); second,
there is the voice of the narrator (my voice as theorist, and stage manager);
there are the voices of the theorists, Goffman, Michalko, Butler,
Titchkosky and the rest, I bring into conversation in this work. There is
Erin. This voice is difficult to pinpoint. It is not a singular voice, but a
voice that embodies more than one being. There is me; my experience of
blindness is folded into Erin’s voice. There is me the narrator. I narrate
through the various voices that appear in the following pages and I narrate
blindness, in part, through the voice of Erin. Finally, there are the voices
of blindness and sight. These two voices represent the crux of this book.
Blindness and sight have spoken to, with and past one another since the
first ray of light hit the retina. The cacophony and kaleidoscopic sound
 Introduction 25

emanating from this multi-layered and often confusing conversation is

represented by the equally multi-layered and confusing voice of the
chorus. What follows attempts to first listen to the conversation between
blindness and sight and, second, to represent it in the depiction of a
dramatic portrayal of this conversation. The dialogue between blindness
and sight always, in contemporary Western culture, privileges sight as the
main and most legitimate interlocutor. This is because this very same
dialogue refuses to listen to the voice of blindness on the basis that it is
sheer distortion and, therefore, generally unintelligible. But as Titchkosky
and Michalko (2014) say in their discussion of narrative inquiry,

To say anything about disability is to tell something of the life of disabil-

ity—its meaning—and “to tell” is the Latin root-meaning of “narrative.”
Disability, then, always has a narrative form; insofar as we say, do, or
imagine something about disability, it is a storied life. (p. 102)

Blindness, too, is storied. It is a life and this book both listens to and tells
the story of blindness. It strives to make the voice of blindness intelligible
in the conversation it has with sight. This is why the stage directions are
far more detailed than they would be in a conventional play. The detail is
representative of the voice of blindness. I write the stage directions with
hyper-clarity so as to distract the audience (readers) from their own image
of blindness. The voice of the stage directions acts as a guide, leading the
audience (readers) to the voice of blindness. In so doing, my aim is to
bring the voice of blindness into its rightful place as a co-interlocutor in
the conversation between blindness and sight. Or, put differently, in the
conversation that is perception. Depicting this conversation or percep-
tion is itself confusing and, therefore, interesting. For example, not only
am I the narrator, theorist, author and performer in this work, I am me,
Devon, someone experiencing changing-sight, someone trying to
understand how to be blind. I pop in and out of this book, blinking as I
comment on what the other voices have said. It is as though I am reading
this book as I am writing it and discovering things about blindness, sight
and my relation to them.
This book also marks my attempt at both living with blindness and
carving a blind identity out of the materials provided me by my culture
26 D. Healey

and by my interpretation of the meaning of these materials. Whilst this

book does come to an end, my formation and understanding of a blind
identity do not.
Enjoy the show.

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 Act I: The Genesis of Blindness

Scene I
SD1: An empty stage with a single spotlight, centre, the rest is dark.
Like everything else, blindness too has a genesis; it must begin some-
where. How did this begin? Surely it began long before my eyes ever saw
and then did not see, since my blindness does not mark the beginning of
blindness as a discovery in the world—it certainly is not new. But at the
same time, it is new for me.
Everyone has a beginning based on a beginning. Finding where this
beginning begins, however, is the difficulty. It is so difficult to say where
or when my blindness began. I don’t have a distinct memory of when I
noticed something different about the way I saw. I have no distinct pre-­
blindness memory of my sight; I no longer remember what clear images
look like. When I remember my sight, I see it through my blindness.
I can’t really say where I was the moment my eyes appeared to me as
more blind than sighted. I don’t have a date on the calendar that marks
the beginning of my blindness, no birth date to celebrate. An exact
account of blindness as a birth2 is not something in my life. It has no
birth story per se. Still, I have a rough idea of when it began and how I
came to know my eyes as ones no longer ordinary. In some ways, this

1
Stage Directions.
2
See Michalko (2002), chapter 5 “The Birth of Disability,” pp. 113–141 for an in-depth discussion
on the birth of disability.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 29

D. Healey, Dramatizing Blindness, Literary Disability Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80811-2_2
30 D. Healey

sounds like a beginning, at least a sort of beginning. One of the ways my

blindness begins is with me but not with me alone. In this sense, I have
never been alone with my blindness nor has anyone else with theirs, for
that matter. As Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko (2009) say, we, dis-
abled people, “live in the midst of others,” (p. 7) thus we live our blind-
ness with others.
Blindness is given life in and through culture, a culture that has sight
as one of its dominant epistemological as well as ontological perspectives.
This was once my culture, my home; this is how I knew that eyes were
meant to see and if they did not, there is a problem. It is from this cul-
tural perspective that it can be said that blindness begins with sight.
Sight is not something we remember as a happening in our lives. It is
just there. It is rarely something we think about having until something
else happens, for example, blurry vision, double vision, and the like. We
treat sight as a given, as natural, as something innate to our being. Indeed,
sight comes to be understood as the world itself, as the “sighted world.”
Blindness makes an appearance in the world as a happening, as some-
thing that happens to sight. Blindness, then, is not something we think
of as natural or given. Instead, it is thought of, as Michalko (2002) says,
“biology gone wrong” (p. 91). It is something “bad” that happens to our
biology that is not supposed to happen and so, we respond in a culturally
appropriate way. We treat this happening as a problem. This problem,
however, is not interpreted as an occasion to reflect upon the place of
sight in our world. Instead, it is treated as a problem belonging to a per-
son, specifically the one who is blind.
Blindness may be thought of as a problem of “disorganized biology”
that requires attention. This attention is manifested in many ways, for
example, the person’s attention, the attention of others, of family, of
friends and even of strangers on the street. And, who better to attend to
disorganized biology than a medical doctor?
And yet, I did not immediately see the doctor. That would have been
“a bit much,” far too dramatic far too soon in the theatre of our everyday
life. That is how I felt at the time. Had I seen a doctor, I may have been
interpreted as overreacting, a hypochondriac, wasting the doctor’s and
my time. I also felt this at the time.
 Act I: The Genesis of Blindness 31

My journey to the doctor was a complex one, one that is a story all its
own, a beginning of a beginning rooted in an ending. My blindness
began with sight; it began in a world I could look at and see; it then
moved, not out of that world, but to a very different perspective of it. I
looked at the world, but saw something very different from what I saw
before. This is where my blindness begins.

Scene II
SD: It is a hot mid-July afternoon. The bright blue of the sky is dotted with
white clouds that look as if a cotton ball has been pulled apart and just sort
of left there. The yellow, almost bright white, of the sun is directly overhead.
A light warm breeze moves the leaves on the trees every now and then, their
gentle rustle breaking the musical sounds of cicadas—this day feels, looks and
sounds like summer. The scene begins with a young girl, seven or eight years
old named Erin, standing on the sidewalk. Her back is turned to the street of
semi-detached homes typical to Scarborough, a neighbourhood just outside
the city of Toronto. She stands, alone, her head slightly cast down, she is trans-
fixed by something on the ground.
The driveway of my grandmother’s home was large, at least it felt that
way to me back then. It was smooth and jet-black. She had it painted
every couple of years to ensure that its colour, its appearance, would not
fade. When it was hot outside with the sun beating down from overhead,
you could feel the driveway almost come to life, sending heat back up to
the sun. If I didn’t have my shoes on, I would sometimes stand on the
sidewalk for a moment or two to cool my feet—and that is the first time
I ever saw it, an image that would later come to follow me wherever I
looked. It was the very first time I ever saw an oil spot.
I stood on the sidewalk facing the end of my grandmother’s driveway,
looking down, spellbound. I was completely transfixed by the simplicity
of its beauty. I stared. The heat from the sun on the jet-black asphalt
made the image appear as if it were alive, swirling like water as it moves
down the drain. It captured my attention.
I had never seen such bright colours on the ground before, or any-
where else for that matter. The swirls moved like a tornado, each circle a
different colour, each colour its own little tornado of movement. The
32 D. Healey

outer rim was a neon bright blue and it shimmered—this caught my eye
first. I stood, watching the warmth of the blue shimmer and swirl into a
hot pink. This pink, oh this pink spoke to me! It was playful and fun, the
little stones on the driveway were highlighted by this pink, and they
offered depth and texture to the image. The hot pink seemed inviting,
almost beckoning me to have a closer look.
SD: Erin moves a bit closer to the image on the driveway, she bends over,
her arms straight, hands pressed against her knees for support, she hov-
ers, closer.
Then, as if out of nowhere, a burst of orangey almost yellowish shim-
mer stole my eyes from the hot pink. The colours seemed as if they were
competing for my gaze—fighting to take my eyesight away from the
other layers of the tornado, away from me, from my control, and all for
itself, as if for its own amusement. How funny I thought this was, to have
colours fight for my attention, the focus of my eyesight as the purpose of
their existence.
SD: Erin squats down, her head resting in her hands, elbows pressed atop
her knees—she looks as though she is about to dive into the oil spot.
My world disappeared into the geometric shapes of the oil spot. The
longer I stared, the more I saw—flashes of green in the shiny rainbow and
even shapes emerged in and through the colours until the shade of late
afternoon moved in and the strength and heat of the sun no longer fed
the oil. The driveway was cooling down and the swirling colours of the oil
spot were not quite as bright and alive.
SD: Erin looks up to the sky, the sun has moved, the driveway is now in
complete shade. Now sitting on the sidewalk she leans back, her arms behind
her, hands on the ground.
How nice it would be to have a rainbow with you wherever you go, I
thought. How nice it would be to have an oil spot to stare into at any
time, something to entertain you and to make the world disappear.
SD: The side door of the house opens, it looks onto the driveway, a voice yells,
“Come on in and get cleaned up for dinner!”

SD: Erin jumps up and is about to run across the driveway over the oil spot
when she is interrupted.
 Act I: The Genesis of Blindness 33

“… and don’t walk through the oil—you’ll get it all over your feet and bring
it in the
house!”

SD: Erin laughs.

“Maybe that’s how I’ll bring the rainbow with me…”

SD: She runs towards the door; we do not see whether she ran through the
oil spot.

Scene III
SD: A rainbow of coloured lights illuminates an empty stage. There is a centre
spotlight of blue, pink, yellow and green that rotates at no particular speed.
There is one lonely figure onstage, not a seven- or eight-year-old girl, but a
woman in her early twenties. It is Erin. She stands stage left, looking—not
staring—but looking at the moving rainbow lights centre. She is standing,
alone, almost at attention, looking, watching the lights as they move.
This was not the oil spot she remembered from her grandmother’s driveway.
She knew what that was and where it came from and what it would do—it
would mess up the house. But now, she was alone with it. Looking. It had a
familiar look that she recognized, but this, this came with a very different feel.
What this was, where it came from and what it could do, what it would do
was unclear.
I don’t know how long blindness had been with me before I noticed its
presence. I’m sure it began with just a speck, a droplet of blindness the
way of drop of oil grows into a spot. I suppose it began with a feeling
rather than a noticing of something different. It was a feeling of difference
that hinted at something.
The ease of simply shifting one’s gaze, the unconscious skilled mastery
of controlled eye muscle movement to look and then have one’s head fol-
low in such a way that prevents any motion sickness, dizziness or distor-
tion of the image suddenly felt different. The way in which my body
interacted with the world, the way I moved as I looked, was no longer
unconscious. Before I ever saw my blindness, I felt it.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
undoubtedly thought as did one of the confident young men
applicants who said: “She hasn’t a chance of passing. Being a girl is
a terrible handicap in the medical profession.” When she had passed
however at the head of the list of thirty-five young men, the trustees
endeavoured to get Dr. Mary to withdraw. When she firmly declined
to do so, though they said it violated all established precedent, they
gave her the place. And a new era in medicine had been
inaugurated.
Here and there throughout the country, other women now began to
be admitted to examinations for internships. They exhibited an
embarrassing tendency for passing at the head of the list. Any of
them were likely to do it. The only way out of the dilemma, then was
for the hospital authorities to declare, as some did, that the institution
had “no accommodations for women doctors” which simply meant
that all of the accommodations had been assigned to men. It is on
this ground that Philadelphia’s Blockley Hospital, the first large city
almshouse in the country to open to women the competitive
examination for internship, again and again refused the appointment
even to a woman who had passed at the head of the list. It was 1914
before Bellevue in New York City found a place for the woman intern:
five women were admitted among the eighty-three men of the staff.
This unequal distribution of professional privileges was the
indication of a lack of professional fellowship far reaching in
consequences. Among the exhibits in the laboratories to-day, there
is a glass bottle containing a kidney preserved in alcohol. In all the
annals of the medical profession, I believe, there has seldom been
another kidney just like it. For some reason or other, too technical for
a layman to understand, it is a very wonderful kidney. Now it
happens that a young woman physician discovered the patient with
that kidney and diagnosed it. A woman surgeon operated on that
kidney and removed it successfully. Then a man physician came
along and borrowed it and read a paper on it at a medical
convention. He is now chronicled throughout the medical fraternity
with the entire credit for the kidney.
“And it isn’t his. It’s our kidney,” I heard the girl doctor say with
flashing eyes. “You’ll take it easier than that when you’re a little older,
my dear,” answered the woman surgeon who had lived longer in the
professional atmosphere that is so chilling to ambition.
It was against handicaps like this that the women in medicine were
making progress. Dr. Gertrude B. Kelly’s name, in New York, is at the
top in the annals of surgery. Dr. Bertha Van Hoesen is a famous
surgeon in Chicago. Dr. Mary A. Smith and Dr. Emma V. P.
Culbertson are leading members of the medical profession in
Boston. Dr. Lillian K. P. Farrar was in 1917 appointed visiting
surgeon on the staff of the Women’s Hospital in New York, the first
woman in New York City to receive such an appointment. Dr. S.
Josephine Baker, who established in New York the first bureau of
child hygiene in the world, is probably more written of than is any
man in medicine. As chief of this department, she has under her
direction 720 employés and is charged with the expenditure annually
of over a million dollars of public money. She is a graduate of Dr.
Blackwell’s medical college in which social hygiene first began to be
taught with the idea of making medicine a preventive as well as a
curative art. It was the idea that Harvard University a few years later
incorporated in a course leading to the degree “Doctor of Public
Health.” And though a woman had thus practically invented “public
health” and another woman, Dr. Baker is the first real and original
doctor of public health, Dr. Baker herself was refused at Harvard the
opportunity to take their course leading to such a title. The university
did not admit women. But a little later the trustees of Bellevue
Hospital Medical College, initiating the course and looking about for
the greatest living authority to take this university chair, came hat in
hand to Dr. Baker, even though their institution does not admit
women to the class rooms. “Gentlemen,” she answered, “I’ll accept
the chair you offer me with one stipulation, that I may take my own
course of lectures and obtain the degree Doctor of Public Health
elsewhere refused me because I am a woman.” Like this the woman
who has practically established the modern science of public health,
in 1916 came into her title. It is probably the last difficulty and
discrimination that the American woman in medicine will ever
encounter.
 The struggle of women for a foothold in the medical profession is
the same story in all lands. It was the celebrated Sir William Jenner
of England who pronounced women physically, mentally and morally
unfit for the practice of medicine. Under his distinguished leadership
the graduates of the Royal College of Physicians in London pledged
themselves, “As a duty we owe it to the college and to the profession
and to the public to offer the fullest resistance to the admission of
women to the medical profession.” Well, they have. The medical
fraternity in all lands took up the burden of that pledge.

A WORLD-WIDE RECONSTRUCTION
But to-day see the builders at work at the College of Physicians
and Surgeons in New York. Yale and Harvard have also announced
the admission of women to their medical colleges. And it is not by
chance now that these three most exclusive medical colleges in the
United States have almost simultaneously removed their restrictions.
They are doing it too at the University of Edinburgh and at the
University of Moscow. The reverberation from the firing line on the
front is shaking all institutions to their foundations. As surely as if
shattered by a bomb, their barriers go down. Like that, the boards of
trustees in all countries are capitulating to the Great Push of the new
woman movement. All over the world to-day the hammers and
chisels are ringing in reconstruction. It is the new place in the sun
that is being made for woman. The little doors of Harvard and Yale
and Columbia are creaking on their ancient hinges because the
gates of the future are swinging wide. It is not a thin line that is
passing through. The cohorts of the woman’s cause are sweeping on
to occupy the field for which their predecessors so desperately
pioneered.
Forward march, the woman doctor! It is the clear call flung back
from the battle fields. Hear them coming! See the shadowy figures
that lead the living women! With 8000 American women doctors to-
day marches the soul of Elizabeth Blackwell. Leading 3000 Russian
women doctors there is the silent figure of Marie Souslova, the first
medical woman of that land, who in 1865 was denied her
professional appellation and limited to the title “scientific midwife.”
With the 1100 British women there keeps step the spirit of Sophia
Jex Blake pelted with mud and denied a degree at Edinburgh
University, who in 1874 founded the London School of Medicine for
Women.
And there is one grand old woman who lived to see the cause she
led for a lifetime won at last. The turn of the tide to victory, as surely
as for the Allies at Verdun or the Marne, came for the professional
woman’s cause when the British War Office unfurled the English flag
over Endell Street Hospital, London. It floated out on the dawn of a
new day, the coming of which flashed with fullest significance on the
vision of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson.[1] The beautiful eyes of her
youth were not yet so dimmed with her eighty years but that all of
their old star fire glowed again when the news of this great war
hospital, entirely staffed by women, was brought to her at her home
in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where she sat in her white cap, her active
hands that had wrought a remarkable career now folded quietly in
her lap.
[1] Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson died at Aldeburgh, Suffolk,
England, Dec. 17, 1917.

Dr. Anderson was the second woman physician of modern times,

the first in England. When as Elizabeth Garrett she came to London
to be a doctor in 1860, there was no University in her land that would
admit her. Physicians with whom she wished to study, were some of
them scornful and some of them rude, and some were simply
amazed. “Why not become a nurse?” one more tolerant than the rest
suggested. The girl shook her head: “Because I mean to make an
income of a thousand pounds a year instead of forty.” The kindly old
doctor who finally yielded to her importunities and admitted her to his
office, also let her in to the lectures at the Middlesex Hospital with
the specific arrangement that she should “dress like a nurse” and
promise earnestly “not to look intelligent.” Her degree she had to go
to Paris for. Like that she got into the medical profession in 1871 a
year before her marriage to the director of the Orient steamship line.
Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women and founder of
the New Hospital for Women, she came through the difficult days
when it was only in “zenana” practice in India that English women
doctors had a free field. Russia too dedicated her pioneer medical
women to the heathen, modestly designing them for the Mussulman
population and at length permitting them the designation “physician
to women and children.” That idea lingered long with civilisation. As
late as 1910 a distinguished British surgeon in a public address
allowed that there was this province for the woman physician, the
treatment of women and children. But any medical woman “who
professed to treat all comers,” her he held to be an “abomination.”
Then the world turned in its orbit and came to 1914. And Elizabeth
Anderson’s eyes looked on the glory of Endell Street. Do you
happen to be of that woman movement which but yesterday moved
upward toward the top in any of the professions so laboriously and
so heavily handicapped? Then for you also, Endell Street is the
shining citadel that to-day marks the final capitulation of the medical
profession to the woman’s cause, as surely as the New York
Infirmary in Livingston Place still stands as the early outpost
established by the brave pioneers. But the ordinary chance traveller
who may search out the unique war hospital in the parish of St. Giles
in High Holborn, I suppose may miss some of this spiritual
significance to which a woman thrills. The buildings which have been
converted from an ancient almshouse to the uses of a hospital are
as dismal and as dingy as any can be in London. They are
surrounded by a fifteen foot high brick wall covered with war
placards, a red one “Air Raid Warning,” a blue one “Join the Royal
Marines,” and a black one “Why More Men are Needed. This is
going to be a long drawn out struggle. We shall not sheathe the
sword until—” and the rest is torn off where it flapped loose in the
winter wind.
In a corner of this wall is set Christ Church, beside which a porter
opens a gate to admit you to the courtyard. Here where the
ambulances come through in the dark, the bands play on visitors’
day. It is a grey court yard with ornamental boxes of bright green
privet. On the benches about wait the soldiers, legless soldiers,
armless soldiers, some of them blind soldiers. On convalescent
parade in blue cotton uniform with the gaiety of red neckties, every
man of them at two o’clock on a Tuesday is eager, expectant, waiting
—for his woman. Mothers, wives, sweethearts are arriving, the girls
with flowers, the women with babies in their arms. And each grabs
his own to his hungry heart. You go by the terrible pain and the
terrible joy of it all that grips you so at the throat. Inside where each
woman just sits by the bedside to hold her man’s hand, it is more
numb and more still. A girl orderly in khaki takes you through. Her
blue shoulder straps are brass lettered “W. H. C.,” “Women’s
Hospital Corps.” The only man about the place who is not a patient is
the porter at the gate. The women in khaki with the epaulets in red,
also brass lettered “W. H. C.,” are the physicians and surgeons.
There is one of these you should not miss. You will know her by
her mascot, the little fluffy white dog “Baby” that follows close at her
heels. Her figure in its Norfolk belted jacket is slightly below the
medium height. Her short swinging skirt reveals trim brown clad
ankles and low brown shoes. She has abundant red brown hair that
is plainly parted and rolled away on either side from a low smooth
brow to fasten in a heavy knot at the back of her head. I set down all
of these details as being of some interest concerning a woman you
surely will want to see. Surgeon in chief and the commanding officer
in charge of this military hospital with 600 beds, she is the daughter
of Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She is also the niece of Mrs.
Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of
Women’s Suffrage Societies. And she is to-day one of England’s
greatest surgeons, Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson, with the rank of
major in the English army.
Her place in this new woman movement is the more significant
because of her prominent affiliation with that of yesterday. For the
militancy in which she is now enlisted Dr. Anderson had her training
in that other militancy that landed women in Holloway Jail. Her
transfer to her present place of government service has come about
in a way that makes her one of our most famous victory exhibits.
“You have silenced all your critics” the War Office told her when they
bestowed on her the honour of her present official rank as she and
her Woman’s Hospital Corps “took” Endell Street.
 It was a stronghold that did not capitulate by any means at the first
onslaught of the women’s forces. There was, at least, as you might
say, a preliminary skirmish. The Woman’s Hospital Corps raised and
financed by British medical women was at the beginning of the war
offered to the British Government. But in the public eye these were
only “physicians to women and children.” Kitchener swore a great
oath and said he’d have none of them for his soldiers. Practically the
War Office told them to “run along.” Well, they did. They went over
the Channel. “They are going now to advance the woman’s cause by
a hundred years. O, if only I were ten years younger,” sighed
Elizabeth Anderson wistfully as she waved them farewell at
Southampton on the morning of Sept. 15, 1914.
France was in worse plight than England. Under the Femmes de
France of the Croix Rouge, the Government there permitted the
Women’s Hospital Corps to establish themselves in what had been
Claridge’s Hotel in the Champs Elysées. In the course of time
rumours reached the British War office of this soldiers’ hospital in
Paris run by English women. Oh, well, of course, women surgeons
might do for French poilus. At length it was learned however that
even the British Tommies were falling into their hands. And Sir Alfred
Keogh, director of the General Medical Council, was hurried across
to see about it.
“Miss Anderson,” he addressed the surgeon in charge, “I should
like to look over the institution.”
“Certainly,” she acquiesced. “But it’s Dr. Anderson, if you please.”
Three times as they went through the wards, he repeated his
mistake. And three times she suggested gravely, “Dr. Anderson, if
you please.”
 DR. ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON
The first woman physician in England and after Dr. Elizabeth
Blackwell of America the next woman of modern times to
practise medicine.
They had finished the rounds. “This,” he said, “is remarkable, ’er
quite remarkable, don’t you know. But may I talk with some of your
patients privately?”
 Then the soldiers themselves, British soldiers, assured him of their
complete satisfaction with the surgical treatment they had received.
Indeed the word, they said, was out in all the trenches that the
Women’s Hospital was the place to get to when a man was
wounded. Women surgeons took more pains, they were less hasty
about cutting off arms and legs, you see. Oh, the Women’s Hospital
was all right.
“Extraordinary, most extraordinary,” murmured Sir Alfred Keogh.
And this report he carried back to the General Medical Council.
“Incredible as it may seem, gentlemen,” he announced gravely, “it
seems to be so.”
“It appears then,” brusquely decided Kitchener, “that these women
surgeons are too good to be wasted on France.” And promptly their
country and the War Office invited them to London. It was England’s
crack regiment after the great drive on the Somme that was tucked
under the covers for repairs at Endell Street. The issue was no
longer in doubt. “Major” Anderson and the Women’s Hospital Corps
held the fort for the professional woman’s cause in England.

WINNING ON THE FRENCH FRONT

Dr. Nicole Gerard-Mangan, fascinating little French feminist,
meanwhile was executing a brilliant coup in demonstration to her
government. France, it was true, had seen that British women could
be military doctors and surgeons. But the French woman doctor, oh,
every one was sure that the French woman doctor’s place was the
home. And if ever there was a woman whom God made just to be
“protected,” you’d say positively it was Nicole Gerard-Mangin.
She stood before me as she came from her operating room,
curling tendrils of bright brown hair escaping from the surgeon’s
white cap set firmly on her pretty head, a surgeon’s white apron tied
closely back over her hips accentuating all their loveliness of line.
She is soft and round and dainty and charming. She has small
shapely hands, as exquisitely done as if modelled by a sculptor. I
looked at her hands in the most amazement, the hands that have
had men’s lives in their keeping, little hands that by the sure swift
skill of them have brought thousands of men back from death’s door.
You’d easily think of her as belonging in a pink satin boudoir or
leading a cotillion with a King of France. And she’s been at the war
front instead. “Madame la petite Major” she is lovingly known to the
soldiers of France. She too has that rank. You will notice on one of
the sleeves of her uniform the gold stripe that denotes a wound and
on her right pink cheek you will see the scar of it. On her other coat
sleeve are the gold bars for three years of military service.
This was the way it happened. In August, 1914, Dr. Gerard-
Mangin was in charge of the tuberculosis sanitarium, Hôpital
Beaugou, in Paris. When the call came for volunteers for army
doctors, she signed and sent in an application, carefully omitting
however to write her first name. The War Office, hurrying down the
lists, just drafted Dr. Gerard-Mangin as any other man. One night at
twelve o’clock her concierge stood before her door with a
government command ordering the doctor to report at once at the
Vosges front. The next morning with a suit case in one hand and a
surgeon’s kit in the other, she was on her way. The astonished
military medecin-en-chef, before whom she arrived, threw up his
hands: “A woman surgeon for the French army! It could not be.”
She held out her government order: “N’est ce pas?” He examined
it more closely. “But yet,” he insisted, “it must be a mistake.”
“En ce moment,” as they say in France, a thousand wounded
soldiers were practically laid at the commander’s feet—and he had
only five doctors at hand. He turned with a whimsical smile to the toy
of a woman before him. After all there was an alertness, an
independent defiance of her femininity that straightened at attention
to duty now every curving line of the little figure. His glance swept
the wounded men: “Take off your hat and stay a while,” he said in
desperation. “But,” he added, “I shall have to report this to the War
Office. There must be an investigation.”
Three months later when the Inspector General of the French
army arrived to make it, he learned that Dr. Gerard-Mangin had
performed six hundred operations without losing a single patient.
“You’ll do even though you are not a man,” he hazarded.
 A little later she was ordered to Verdun to organise a hastily
improvised epidemic hospital. For the first week she had no doctors
and no nurses. There was no equipment but a barracks and the
beds. As fast as these could be set up, a patient was put in. There
were no utensils of any kind but the tin cans which she picked up
outside where they had been cast away by the commissary
department when emptied of meat. There was no heat. There was
no water in which to bathe her patients except that which she melted
from the ice over an oil lamp. For six weeks she worked without once
having her clothing off. One of her feet froze and she had to limp
about in one shoe. Eventually medical aid arrived and she had a
staff of twenty-five men under her direction. There were eight
hundred beds. For seventeen months the hospital was under shell
fire. There were officers in the beds who went mad. Three hundred
and twenty-nine panes of glass were shattered one day. A man next
the little doctor fell dead. A piece of shell struck her but she had only
time to staunch the flow of blood with her handkerchief. Outside the
American ambulance men were coming on in their steady lines.
They delivered to Nicole Gerard-Mangin 18,000 wounded in four
days, whom she in turn gave first aid and passed on to interior
hospitals. Later when 150,000 French soldiers were coming back
from the army infected with tuberculosis, the Government required
its greatest expert for the diagnosis of such cases. And Dr. Gerard-
Mangin in the fall of 1916 was recalled from the front to be made
medecin-en-chef of the new Hôpital Militaire Edith Cavell in the Rue
Desnouettes, Paris. It is a group of low white buildings with red roofs.
The white walls inside are ornamented above the patients’ beds with
garlands of red and blue and yellow flowers. And the commanding
officer’s own gay little office has curtains of pink flowered calico.
Grey haired French scientists in the laboratories here are taking their
orders from Madame la petite Major. Soldiers in the corridors are
giving her the military salute. One day there came a celebrated
French general: “When I heard about you at Verdun,” he said, “I
could not believe it. I insisted, she cannot be a surgeon. She is only
a nurse. I have made the journey all the way to Paris,” he smiled in
candour, “to find out if you are real.”
 The records of the War Office show how real. Dr. Gerard-Mangin
did her two years’ service at the front without a day off for illness and
never so much as an hour’s absence from her post of duty. She is
the only surgeon with the French army who has such a record. Her
right to a place in the profession in which no man has been able to
equal, let alone surpass, her achievement, would seem to be
assured beyond question. Let us write high on the waving banners
carried by the cohorts of the woman’s cause the name of Nicole
Gerard-Mangin. It was not a simple or an easy thing that she has
done. You would know if you heard her voice tremulous yet with the
agony on which she has looked. “I shall nevair forget! I shall nevair
forget!” she told me brokenly, in the gay little pink calico office. And
the beautiful brown eyes of the little French major, successful army
surgeon, were suddenly suffused with woman’s tears.

WHAT SCOTTISH WOMEN DOCTORS DID

Like this the woman war doctor began. Before the first year of the
great conflict was concluded, there was not a battle front on which
she had not arrived. And the Scottish Women’s Hospitals have
appeared on five battle fronts. Organised by the Scottish Federation
of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and supported
by the entire body of constitutional suffragists under Mrs. Fawcett of
London, they afford spectacular evidence of how completely the
forces of the woman movement of yesterday have been marshalled
into formation for the winning of the new woman movement of to-
day. Dr. Elsie Inglis[2] the intrepid leader of the Scottish Women’s
Hospitals, like a general disposing her troops to the best strategic
advantage, has literally followed the armies of Europe, placing her
now indispensable auxiliary aid where the world’s distress at the
moment seems greatest. There have been at one time as many as
twelve of the Scottish hospitals in simultaneous operation.
Sometimes they are forced to pick up their entire equipment and
retreat with the Allies before the onslaught of the Hun hordes.
Sometimes they have been captured by the enemy, only eventually
to reach London and start out once more for new fields to conquer.
 [2] Died 1917.

These women in the grey uniforms with Tartan trimmings and the
sign of the thistle embroidered on their hats and their epaulets, have
crossed the vision of the central armies with a frequency that has
seemed, to the common soldier at least, to partake of the
supernatural. Bulgarian prisoners brought into the Scottish Women’s
Hospital operating at Mejidia on the Roumanian front looked up into
the doctors’ faces in amazement to inquire: “Who are you? We
thought we had done for you. There you were in the south. Now here
you are in north. Are you double?” Of this work in the north, in the
Dobrudja from where they were obliged to retreat into Russia, the
Prefect of Constanza said in admiration: “It is extraordinary how
these women endure hardship. They refuse help and carry the
wounded themselves. They work like navvies.”
At the very beginning of the war, the Scottish women left their first
record of efficiency at Calais. Their hospital there in the Rue
Archimede, operated by Dr. Alice Hutchinson, had the lowest
percentage of mortality for the epidemic of enteric fever. In France
the hospital at Troyes under Dr. Louise McElroy was so good that it
received an official command to pick up and proceed to Salonika to
be regularly attached to the French army, this being one of the very
few instances on record where a voluntary hospital has been so
honoured. The Scottish Hospital under Dr. Francis Ivins, established
in the deserted old Cistercian abbey at Royaumont, is one of the
show hospitals of France. When the doctors first took possession of
the ancient abbey they had no heat, no light but candles stuck in
bottles, no water but that supplied by a tap in the holy fountain, and
they themselves slept on the floor. But eventually they had
transformed the great vaulted religious corridors into the comfortable
wards of Hôpital Auxiliarie 301. They might, the French Government
had said, have the “petite blessé.” They would be entrusted with
operations on fingers and toes! And every week or so, some French
general ran down from Paris to see if they were doing these right.
But within two months the War Office itself had asked to have the
capacity of the hospital increased from 100 to 400 beds. And the
medical department of the army had been notified to send to
Royaumont only the “grande blessés.” At the end of the first week’s
drive on the Somme, all of the other hospitals were objecting that
they could receive no more patients: their overworked staffs could
not keep up with the operations already awaiting them in the
crowded wards. “But,” said the French Government, “see the Dames
du Royaumont! Already they have evacuated their wounded and
report to us for more.”
 MISS NANCY NETTLEFOLD
Leader in the campaign to admit women to the practise of law in
England.
It was in Serbia that four Scottish hospitals behind the Serbian
armies on the Danube and the Sava achieved a successful
campaign in spite of the most insurmountable difficulties. Here under
the most primitive conditions of existence, every service from
bookkeeping to bacteriology, from digging ditches to drawing water
was done by women’s hands. It was not only the wounded to whom
they had to minister. They came into Serbia through fields of white
poppies and fields of equally thick white crosses over fresh graves.
They faced a country that was overcome with pestilence. All the
fevers there are raged through the hospitals where patients lay three
in a bed, and under the beds and in the corridors and on the steps
and on the grass outside. After months of heartbreaking labour when
the plague had finally abated, the enemy again overran Serbia and
the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, hastily evacuating, retreated to the
West Moravian Valley. Some of the doctors were taken prisoners and
obliged to spend months with the German and Austrian armies
before their release. Others joined in the desperate undertaking of
that remarkable winter trek of the entire Serbian nation fleeing over
the mountains of Montenegro. Scores perished. But the Scottish
women doctors, ministering to the others, survived. Dr. Curcin, chief
of the Serbian medical command, has said: “As regards powers of
endurance, they were equal to the Serbian soldiers. As regards
morale, nobody was equal to them. In Albania I learned that the
capacity of the ordinary Englishwoman for work and suffering is
greater than anything we ever knew before about women.”
Like that the record of the woman war doctor runs. Where, oh,
where are all those earlier fabled disabilities of the female sex for the
practice of the profession of medicine? A very celebrated English
medical man, returning recently from the front, found a woman
resident physician in charge of the London hospital of whose staff he
was a particularly distinguished member. In hurt dignity, he promptly
tendered his resignation, only to be told by the Board of Directors
practically to forget it. And he had to.
Why man, you see you can’t do that sort of thing any more!
Yesterday, it is true, a woman physician was only a woman. To-day
her title to her place in her profession is as secure as yours is. Seven
great London hospitals that never before permitted so much as a
woman on their staff, now have women resident physicians in
charge. Five of them are entirely staffed by women. The British
Medical Research Commission is employing over a score of women
for the highly scientific work of pathology. When one of those
Scottish Women’s Hospitals on its way to Serbia was requisitioned
for six weeks to assist the British army at Malta where the wounded
were coming in from Gallipoli, the authorities there, at length
reluctantly obliged to let them go, decided that the Malta military
hospitals in the future could not do without the woman doctor. They
sent to London for sixty of her. And the War Office reading their
report asked for eighty more for other military hospitals. By January,
1915, professional posts for women doctors were being offered at
the rate of four and five a day to the London School of Medicine for
Women, and they hadn’t graduates enough to meet the demand!
Like that the nations have capitulated. The woman physician’s
place in Europe to-day is any place she may desire. Russia, which
before the war, would not permit a woman physician on the
Petrograd Board of Health because its duties were too onerous and
too high salaried for a woman, had by 1915 mobilised for war service
even all of her women medical students of the third and fourth years.
France has Dr. Marthe Francillon-Lobre, eminent gynecologist,
commanding the military hospital, Ambulance Maurice de Rothschild
in the Rue de Monceau, Paris. In Lyons the medecin-en-chef of the
military hospital is Dr. Thyss-Monod who was nursing a new baby
when she assumed her military responsibilities. Everywhere the
woman doctor rejected of the War Office of yesterday is now counted
one of her country’s most valuable assets. And so precious is she
become to her own land, that she may not be permitted to leave for
any other. “Over there” the governments of Europe have ceased to
issue passports to their women doctors.
You of the class of 1921, you go up and occupy. Medical
associations will no longer bar you as in America until the seventies
and in England until the nineties. Salaried positions will not be
denied you. Clinical and hospital opportunities will not be closed to
you. You of to-day will no more be elbowed and jostled aside. You
will not even be crowded out from anywhere. For there is room
everywhere. Oh, the horror and the anguish of it, room everywhere.
And every day of the frightful world conflict they are making more of
it. Great Britain alone has sent 10,000 medical men to the front.
America, they say, is sending 35,000.
 Hurry, hurry, urges this the first profession in which the women’s
battalions have actually arrived as it hastily clears the way for you.
The New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, not to be
outdone by any institution now bidding for women’s favour, has
rushed up an “emergency” plant, a new $200,000 building. The
London School of Medicine has erected a thirty thousand pound
addition and the public appeal for the funds was signed by Premier
Asquith himself. The nations to-day are waiting for the women who
shall come out from the colleges equipped for medical service.

A PLACE IN EVERY PROFESSION

And after the most arduous profession of all, how about the
others? If a woman can be a doctor at a battle front, how long before
she can be a doctor of divinity? At the City Temple in London on a
Sunday in March, 1917, a slender black robed figure preceded an
aged clergyman up the pulpit steps. With one hand resting on the
cushioned Bible she stood silhouetted against the black hanging at
the back of the pulpit, her face shining, illumined. By the time that the
white surpliced choir had ceased chanting “We have done those
things that we ought not to have done,” the ushers were hanging in
the entrance corridor the great red lettered signs “Full.”
The house was packed to the last seat in the gallery to hear Miss
Maude Royden, one of England’s leading suffragists, “preach.” This
church is nearly 300 years old and only once before, when Mrs.
Booth of the Salvation Army was granted the privilege, has a woman
ever spoken from its pulpit. Some six months since, Maude Royden
has now been appointed pulpit assistant at the City Temple, the first
woman in England to hold such a position. Dr. Fort Newton, the
pastor, in announcing the innovation, declared: “We want the woman
point of view, the woman insight and the woman counsel.” The City
Temple is not an Episcopalian Church. But even the established
church has recently heard an archbishop cautiously pronounce the
opinion that “we may invite our church women to a much larger
share in the Christian service than has been usual.” You see there
are 2000 English clergymen enrolled as chaplains at the front.
Laywomen were last year permitted to make public addresses in the
National Mission of Repentance. They thus ascended the chancel
steps. A committee of bishops and scholars—and one woman—has
now been appointed to see how much farther women may be
permitted to go on the way to the pulpit itself. A few of the smaller
churches in America have a woman minister in charge. But from the
arduous duties of the highest ecclesiastical positions women in all
lands are still “protected.” High established places are of course the
last to yield. Theology continues to be the most closed profession.
But Maude Royden in the pulpit of the London City Temple, the
highest ecclesiastical place to which a woman anywhere in the world
has yet attained, has, we may say, captured an important trench.
In the field of science the opposing forces are even more steadily
falling back before the advancing woman movement. One of the
most conservative bodies, the Royal Astronomical Society of
England, has added a clause to its charter permitting women to
become fellows. The Royal Institute of British Architects has also
decided to accept women as fellows and in 1917 the Architectural
Association for the first time opened its doors to women students.
Germany even has several women architects employed in military
service, among them Princess Victoria of Bentheim. Russia, in 1916,
admitted women to architecture and engineering.
Chemistry is distinctly calling women in all lands. Sheffield
University, England, in 1916 announced for the first time courses in
the metallurgical department for training girls as steel chemists to
replace young men who have been “combed out” of Sheffield’s large
industrial works. Firms in Leeds, Bradford and South Wales are filling
similar vacancies with women. Bedford College of London University
had last year started a propaganda to induce young women to study
chemistry. In 1916 there were some twelve graduates in the
chemical department and the college received applications from the
industrial world for no less than 100 women chemists. So insistent
was the demand that even Woolwich Arsenal was willing to take a
graduate without waiting for her to get her degree. Women are
wanted too in physics and bacteriology. A London University woman
has been appointed to a position at the National Physical Laboratory
at Teddington and there were last year, at this one university, offers
of twenty positions for women physicists that could not be filled. All
over the world now, in trade journals are beginning to appear
advertisements for women chemists and physicists.
Even in the teaching profession there is the record of new ground
won. Women have of course been longest admitted to this the
poorest paid profession, and in it they have been relegated to the
poorest paid places. But now over in Europe, note that one-third of
all the masters in the German upper high schools are enlisted in the
army and with the consent of the Department of Education women
are for the first time being appointed to these places, in some
instances even at the same salaries as were received by the men
whom they replace. Russia had in the first year of the war opened
the highest teaching positions in that country to women, by a special
act of the Duma providing that “their salaries shall equal those of
men in the same position.” Russia also in 1915 had her first woman
college professor, Mme. Ostrovskaia, occupying the chair of Russian
history at the University of Petrograd. In 1916 Mlle. Josephine
Ioteyko, a celebrated Polish scientist, had been invited to lecture at
the College de France in Paris. In 1917 Germany had its first woman
professor of music, Fraulein Marie Bender, at the Royal High School
of Music in Charlottenburg. And in the same year England had
appointed its first woman to an open university chair, when Dr.
Caroline Spurgeon was made professor of English literature at
Bedford College.