A World without Martha

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.

Short-listed for Bisexual Nonfiction, Lambda Literary Awards 2020 (Canada)

“A World without Martha reminds us that disability is not just an individual issue, it is a family issue.”

A World without Martha reminds us that disability is not just an individual issue, it is a family issue. - David J. Wilson (H-Disability)

Victoria Freeman is a writer, theatre artist, educator, and public historian. She is the co-creator, with L'Arche Toronto Sol Express, of Birds Make Me Think about Freedom, a play about the experiences of peoples institutionalized for intellectual disability, which won a Patron's Pick award at the 2018 Toronto Fringe Festival. She serves on the advisory board of Uncovering the People's History, which documents the stories of institutional survivors and their families for Family Alliance Ontario. She also co-wrote the Talking Treaties Spectacle with Ange Loft of Jumblies Theatre, which was performed in 2017 and 2018 at Fort York in Toronto. Her previous book, Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America, was shortlisted for the 2000 Writers' Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. She teaches in the Canadian Studies Program at Glendon College, and in the History Department at York University, in Toronto.

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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