Strong proud sisters: Girls and young women with disabilities.

INTRODUCTION

Girls and young women with disabilities in this country are a large, diverse group, numbering somewhere between 5 percent and 8 percent of all female youth, depending on how disability is defined. They include girls and young women with physical, sensory, learning, intellectual, emotional or health disabilities that may be visible or invisible, as well as stable or progressive. Some girls in this group have been disabled since birth while others have acquired a disability during childhood or adolescence. Girls and young women with disabilities belong to virtually all racial and ethnic groups and socioeconomic classes, although they are overrepresented in some--for example, among poor families.

Despite their diversity, what binds girls and young women with disabilities together is their shared experience of double discrimination based on gender and disability, often compounded further by discrimination based on race, ethnicity, class and/or sexual orientation. Discrimination, and the underlying negative assumptions and stereotypes about girls with disabilities and their potential, are far more limiting to girls' survival and success than any limitations imposed by their disabilities, no matter how significant. But the force that binds girls and young women with disabilities goes beyond multiple oppressions to include the creative and cultural aspects of the disability experience combined with the particular vantage point of being female.

Disabled girls are resilient and resistant. They would have to be to survive in such an unwelcoming world. And the very experience of living with a disability can give girls a different take on the world as they develop nontraditional ways of accomplishing the ongoing tasks of life and are able to question traditional values of perfection, independence and speed, for example. As a result, they have much to teach their nondisabled sisters, both young and older.

What do we know about the lives of girls and young women, their oppression and their resilience? While we know more than we realize, as this paper demonstrates, we still do not know nearly enough. Given the widespread interest in girls over the past decade, and the plethora of research and reports, we might wonder why this is the case. Unfortunately, none of the dozen or so major documents on the status of girls that have emerged in the past several years includes more than passing reference to girls with disabilities. Despite increasing appreciation of the heterogeneity of girls and the need to address such factors as race, ethnicity and class, disability status has not been recognized as a significant variable. At best, disability has been mentioned in a laundry list of variables to consider; more often, it has been excluded.

It also is noteworthy that those researchers who focus on the status of disabled youth have not done much better in focusing on disabled girls. Just as gender research has given little consideration to disability status, disability research has given little consideration to gender. Thanks to the growth of the disabled women's movement in this country and around the world, however, research on disabled adults now sometimes includes disaggregation of data by gender; however, research on youth is not there yet.

Further, in studies of disabled youth (and, until recently, adults) disability status is seen as such a significant explanatory factor that other significant characteristics -- such as gender, race, ethnicity, and class, for example -- are often overlooked. Yet research on disabled women and girls demonstrates that this is a misguided notion. For youth with disabilities, gender does matter. And in our study of girls, disability status is a significant variable to consider, compounding and, at times, also elucidating the impact of gender.