Beryl Potter was a reserved working-class mother of three living a decent life, or so it seemed, when a harmless slip and fall marked the unravelling of everything that she had known about herself and the world around her. Over the course of six years, she endured unimaginable pain. As doctors raced to save her life, her limbs and eyesight were taken from her one by one. In the span of a few years, she lost nearly half her body, her financial security, her home, her husband, and any semblance of a recognizable future. A survivor of more than one hundred surgeries, a dangerous opioid addiction, and multiple suicide attempts, Beryl Potter devoted herself to bettering the lives of other people with disabilities and made a tremendous contribution to disability awareness from the 1970s to 1990s. In this unparalleled biography, Dustin Galer demonstrates how Beryl Potter seemed to crack the code of the social system that oppressed her. By wading into the weeds of her complicated life before and after her accident, Galer leaves readers with a complex portrait of a woman who defied and challenged gender and disability norms of her time, paving the way for disability justice.

About the Author
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.

Reviews
"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



Book Information
ISBN 9781771136372
Author Dustin Galer
Format Paperback
Page Count 324
Imprint Between the Lines
Publisher Between the Lines