Another Strand of Our Diversity: Some Thoughts from a Feminist Therapist with Severe Chronic Illness

This article represents the author’s attempt to open the subjects of disability and accessibility-for-all in the women’s community and specifically the feminist therapy community. It is a revised version of a presentation given at the May 1990 Advanced Feminist Therapy Institute Conference in Chicago.

The author’s illnesses, CFIDS (Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome) and MCS/EI (Multiple Chemical Sensitivity/Environmental Illness) are “women’s illnesses,” and, as such, are generally misunderstood and ignored. For this reason, the author describes in some detail her personal experiences, physical and emotional, of becoming and being severely chronically ill. She discusses shortcomings in the women’s therapy community’s response to disabled women and suggests some analysis of the phenomenon of what she calls the “active unwillingness to know.”