Finding collections relating to d/Deaf, disabled and neurodiverse people

One of the aims of our project is to make collections relating to d/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people more visible – and to share some of the objects our Fellows and Trainees are discovering.

Some will have quite obvious connections to disabled people’s lives – a walking stick, some braille or images of disabled people. But we will also be exploring less obvious connections too. Sometimes the significance of an object is its owner; its part in a bigger story, or the way someone with lived experience of disability has responded to it. In this way we hope to broaden the ways that d/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent stories are told.

Collections

EUGENICS TALK INVITATION (Paper invitation)

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Rights information: Copyright: Hastings Museum and Art Gallery

Description

Addressed to Miss Jenner of Guestling, this invitation to a Suffrage Society talk on Eugenics is dated just three months before the outbreak of the First World War. Did Miss Jenner attend and, if so, what did she learn about the argument that ‘societies could be improved by encouraging enlightened and able-bodied women to have more children and discouraging poor and disabled women from breeding’?

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- Jack Guy, Curating for Change Fellow, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery
Community curation: I was attracted to this object by the juxtaposition of two concepts – women’s suffrage and eugenics. What interested The Hastings, St. Leonards, and East Sussex Suffrage Society – part of a peaceful movement to win votes for women – with a topic that promoted control over the reproductive rights of certain segments of society? I would love to have been a fly-on- the-wall to hear what Miss Boldero had to say to the women of Hastings and St. Leonards who received and accepted this invitation.