Description

Victoria Freeman was only four when her parents followed medical advice and sent her sister away to a distant, overcrowded institution. Martha was not yet two, but in 1960s Ontario there was little community acceptance or support for raising children with intellectual disabilities at home.

In this frank and moving memoir, Victoria describes growing up in a world that excluded and dehumanized her sister. She writes too of her own journey to understand the policies and assumptions about disability that profoundly affected her entire family. Despite society’s long insistence that that only a “normal” life was worth living, changing attitudes to both disability and difference would eventually offer both sisters new possibilities for healing and self-discovery.

A World Without Martha documents the collateral damage of institutionalization on families, as well as the ties, both traumatic and loving, that bind family members to one another over the course of a lifetime.

A World without Martha: A Memoir of Sisters, Disability, and Difference

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Paperback / softback by Victoria Freeman

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Short Description:

Victoria Freeman was only four when her parents followed medical advice and sent her sister away to a distant, overcrowded... Read more

    Publisher: University of British Columbia Press
    Publication Date: 01/10/2019
    ISBN13: 9780774880404, 978-0774880404
    ISBN10: 0774880406

    Number of Pages: 328

    Non Fiction , Biography

    Description

    Victoria Freeman was only four when her parents followed medical advice and sent her sister away to a distant, overcrowded institution. Martha was not yet two, but in 1960s Ontario there was little community acceptance or support for raising children with intellectual disabilities at home.

    In this frank and moving memoir, Victoria describes growing up in a world that excluded and dehumanized her sister. She writes too of her own journey to understand the policies and assumptions about disability that profoundly affected her entire family. Despite society’s long insistence that that only a “normal” life was worth living, changing attitudes to both disability and difference would eventually offer both sisters new possibilities for healing and self-discovery.

    A World Without Martha documents the collateral damage of institutionalization on families, as well as the ties, both traumatic and loving, that bind family members to one another over the course of a lifetime.

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