Stories/Lived Experience
Symposium
Author: Dr Ana María Sánchez Rodríguez, MSCA Fellow and Adjunct Assistant Professor of the Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute
Stephanie Ortoleva, founder of Women Enabled International (WEI) advocates for women and girls with disabilities. She says that, “disabled women are organizing for ourselves because we have found that other movements, whether it’s the women’s rights movement or the disability rights movement, very often don’t include our issues as the key points of their advocacy. Disabled women just aren’t going to be silent anymore” (Ford Foundation, 2020).
In the summer of 2012, I started my research journey as an intern for WEI. WEI wanted to help and join the work on the revision of laws in India and globally. The central issue was violence against women and girls with disabilities. The same year, Stephanie and Hope Lewis published a seminal work on violence against women with disabilities called: Forgotten Sisters – A Report on Violence Against Women with Disabilities: An Overview of its Nature, Scope, Causes and Consequences.
I interacted remotely with Stephanie until the autumn of 2012 when I travelled to Washington DC and met her and Frank (her husband) in person. We spent a week going from meeting to meeting, WEI participated in the Empower Partnerships for Inclusive Communities Program, sponsored by Mobility International USA (MIUSA) and partnered with the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy and SWAYAM, both organizations based in Kolkata. In this context, I was invited by Stephanie to come to India in January 2013 to explore the relationship between organizations working with people with disabilities and with women’s rights organizations seeking to prevent violence against women and girls with disabilities. I changed my dissertation topic to address civil society organizations’ practices in ending violence against women with disabilities. After the internship, I saw Stephanie a few more times, but I wasn’t travelling to the USA as frequently as I would have liked.
Emotions ran quietly when I found out that she was retiring from WEI in 2021, stepping away to let other women lead WEI. After 10 years, WEI has a new leader, Maryangel Garcia-Ramos, she is a human rights advocate, and founder of Mexican Women with Disabilities, who takes after Stephanie’s steps. When I received WEI’s email to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the organization, I was thrilled, first, to learn that Maryangel was the new executive director and secondly, to honour Stephanie and celebrate WEI’s 10th anniversary.
Stephanie is a woman that I admire, she is down to earth, has a great sense of humour, and pampers her friends. I reconnected with her to have a brief interview, as I wanted more than ever to introduce her to the Ideas in ALL readers. The conversation took place through Zoom and, although it is nothing like being together enjoying, perhaps, a glass of wine or savouring a piece of dark chocolate, we were tuned in. This is how the interview went.
My first question was ambitious, asking her who she is, to which she replied: “I’m a feminist. I’m a disability rights activist, and a partner in a personal relationship and I don’t know those are some of the things that are important to me. I’m a friend to many feminists and a mentor to younger feminists and a supporter”. Throughout my life, I had the fortune to have great mentors, and I consider Stephanie to be one of them. She explains mentoring by saying that it, “keeps one engaged, energized and young, as my mother used to always say that every year that you get older you should have a friend who’s younger than your youngest friend”. Mentoring is also about learning new ideas and facing new challenges, she adds, “that’s really one of the things that you gain from working with younger women” and most importantly, it is here that we find the next generation of global feminist and disabled feminist leadership.
WEI is one of her dreams, she knew that she would work with women’s rights issues as it comprises the “impetus” that drove her professional work. Women and disability rights were not intersected. The disability movement was mostly male-driven, and women’s rights movements were not inclusive of women with disabilities. WEI was founded to fill that gap.
After 10 years since the founding of the WEI and looking back at this decade of tireless advocacy, Stephanie reflects on the feminist movement, which has come a long way to engage directly with issues of disability rights. She mentions: “at the early stages, I think there were many feminists who like much of society didn’t see disabled women as women or as possible feminists”. The disabled women’s movement grew, as she notes, and its impact increased with feminists making disability an issue that became important for the feminist movement. Altogether, feminists became disabled women themselves and as Stephanie points out: “I think that had a significant impact on the feminist movement in embracing the rights of disabled women because as time passed, many of them were becoming disabled women as they grew older”.
As we approached the end of the interview, I asked her about what she would say to other women. Stephanie reminds us that there has always been a backlash against women’s rights, but nonetheless, “the more the movement begins to recognize a broader group of women and be more inclusive in the rights of women with different and other intersecting issues the movement grows much stronger”.
Although Stephanie’s work is not done with WEI, she will continue mentoring, speaking in different forums and providing expert advice. As she constantly reminds us of the importance of supporting each other: “We need to support our sisters who are struggling in other places, dimensions, and areas; the issues are different for different groups of disabled women, but there are certain commonalities that we all face”.