Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

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There are things in the world that need fixing, and you cannot fix them without pointing out that they are broken; the fact that both the pointing out and the fixing makes comfortable people less comfortable is no reason not to do what you know to be right." In the introduction to Weird Sisters she writes: “I read about witches; I read about writers; I read about nuns, beguines and anchoresses; I read about women who had been shut up in institutions; I read about outcast girls and pathologised mothers. Sometimes I would read myself down a blind alley: anchoresses, for example, turned out to be not weird at all, but more akin to the sort of modern woman who has raised her family and decided to retrain as a counsellor.” We exchange opinions on the possibility that various authors, pop stars and visual artists might be autistic. My other autistic female friends (most of whom have humanities degrees) play this speculation game on a regular basis. It’s a guilty secret. They are all, constantly, scanning the radar for pings from other weird sisters. But Limburg and I agree not to include the names of the artists we discussed in this article. “I wish this were the sort of thing one could say out loud,” shrugs Limburg. “But it isn’t. Because there is a stigma and people are seen as their own family’s property.”

Letters To My Weird Sisters by Joanne Limburg | Waterstones Letters To My Weird Sisters by Joanne Limburg | Waterstones

this is my account, written under my name, and I'm not going to describe myself in someone else's terms…” I have not read much on autism and I felt like this was a good starting point for me as it was easy to digest but was still powerful and sometimes harrowing. The authors experience of her feelings of fear, and guilt that she went through during pregnancy and after birth was really vulnerable. Letters to My Weird Sisters is a book where the author writes to four women in history who she identifies as her weird sisters. They are women that were outcasted from society and judged for their ‘not normal’ behaviour.

Letters To My Weird Sisters

My personal favourites were the letter to Virginia Woolf, Adelheid Bloch, and Katharina Kepler - although every letter is exceptional. Today she has learnt that the version of femininity she rejected is equally likely to be “studied and perfectly reproduced by some autistic girls”. This “masking” is often believed to be the reason that so many autistic girls fail to get the diagnosis that would help them understand themselves and get the support they need. Limburg doesn’t buy the theory that women are innately better at masking than boys. It’s just that, given the higher social expectations placed on girls, “heaven help us if we don’t make the effort!”. Limburg describes movingly her own struggles as a new mother and the pressure of society's expectations...Through such delicately intertwined experiences, Limburg quietly shouts for change.' Times Literary Supplement In her sixth decade, Limburg reflects that “there is cultural space for outspoken older women. We still get vilified. But nobody knows what to do with you when you’re 22 and you think you have a speaking part. Being a girl is about looking cool or looking accommodating. It’s not about speech.” Because she experiences other people’s distress quite acutely, Limburg has developed a stereotypically female tendency to “smooth the room because I can’t cope with the jaggedness”. I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in reading more about Autism, disability rights & awareness, intersectional feminism, disability & motherhood, and neurodivergent histories. This book is best read empathetically.

Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism - Goodreads Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism - Goodreads

Following a midlife Autism diagnosis, Limburg sets out to find “other women who had been misunderstood in their time.” LETTERS TO MY WEIRD SISTERS consists of six letters: to the Reader, to Virginia Woolf (whose problematic elements she does speak to very eloquently), to Adelheid Bloch (a victim of nazi eugenics and state-sanctioned murder), to Frau V (the mother of one of Hans Asperger’s male child patients), to Katharina Kepler (the socially outcast and isolated mother of astronomer Johannes Kepler who was tried as a witch in the early 1600s in Germany), and to Caron Freeborn (the late Autistic writer and close friend of Limburg). I had a duty to bear witness… to remember, to make sure that your memories and names would never be erased as your living bodies and minds had been.” The themes in this book are of interest to me, particularly the exploration of Limburg’s own experience with autism, as, like so many other things in life, we are still only beginning to understand from the perspective of female presentation. If you have any level of interest in this subject, you will find this book honest and enlightening and you will more than likely want to read more. One of the most interesting figures encountered in the book is Frau V. Little is known about her, including her true name. A 1944 article by Hans Asperger – among the first researchers of autism –mentions her as the mother of one of the boys he was treating in the University Paediatric Clinic in Vienna. Using the scarce details available, Limburg constructs a portrait of a woman who cares deeply about her child’s fate but also shares many traits with him. However, notably, Asperger did not consider the possibility of Frau V being autistic herself.

Jeg tror det er sundt for mange os at høre om handicappede mennesker som vi måske ikke selv identificerer og jeg tror at dette er en god måde at starte. For selvom forfatteren ikke selv er intellektuelt handicappede så giver hun gennem hele bogen henvisninger til yderlig læsning. It's possible to save these lives—all we need to do is get everyone to agree that it's worth the effort.”