Beryl

Dustin Galer is a professional historian with a PhD in history from the University of Toronto. He wrote the first book-length history of the Canadian disability rights movement, Working Towards Equity, and has published widely on the topic of disability history and labour. He works as a personal historian producing family and corporate history projects and is currently working on his next book about the tragic death of a developmentally disabled man and the complicated quest for justice. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario where he can often be found toiling away in his garden.Judy Rebick is a life-long activist, feminist, journalist, and writer.

“Long before the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Beryl Potter did some of the most important pioneering disability rights activism. In this comprehensive and thoughtful biography, Dustin Galer resurrects a lost story of dignity, advocacy, and triumph. An important contribution to both disability studies and history, Galer painstakingly crafts a book that is both scholarly and personal.”– Ravi Malhotra, co-author of Exploring Disability Identity and Disability Rights through Narratives: Finding a Voice of Their Own // “Dustin Galer’s storytelling is vivid and picturesque. His careful research and attention to detail transports the reader from the rooms of a 1920s Liverpool tenement to those in a Toronto lowrise during the 1980s. This book immerses the reader in Beryl Potter’s life and extraordinary story of personal transformation, ignited (for better or worse) by the effects of her limb amputations and vision loss. For anyone interested in the social history of the disability movement in Canada, this important memoir is required reading.” – Donna Thomson, author of The Four Walls of My Freedom: Lessons I’ve Learned from a Life of Caregiving

• Foreword by Judy RebickPrologueChapter 1LiverpoolChapter 2Moonlight FlitChapter 3War, Marriage, and MotherhoodChapter 4To CanadaChapter 5Joining the (Paid) WorkforceChapter 6An Ordinary Slip and FallChapter 7Six Years of PainChapter 8AddictedChapter 9TaxiChapter 10Life AfterChapter 11NostalgiaChapter 12A New LifeChapter 13Ability ForumChapter 14Aware BearChapter 15Leaning InChapter 16Transit ActivismChapter 17Life Another WayChapter 18RightsChapter 19EquityChapter 20AccessChapter 21Order of OntarioChapter 22Outside Looking InChapter 23Off the RecordChapter 24DennisChapter 25Power of the StoryChapter 26An Ordinary HeroChapter 27PoliticsChapter 28Common SenseChapter 29Order of CanadaChapter 30Final StopChapter 31RemembranceChapter 32AftermathEpilogueAuthor’s NoteAcknowledgementsNotesIndex