Marilyn Saviola, disability rights advocate, dies at 74
Marilyn E. Saviola, who after childhood polio left her a quadriplegic spent much of her adult life advocating for people with disabilities, pushing for the removal of both the physical barriers and the attitudes that hinder people like her from fully participating in society, died Nov. 23 at her home in New York City. She was 74.
Independence Care System, which supports people with disabilities and chronic conditions, and where Saviola was a senior vice president, posted news of her death on its website. The cause was not given.
Saviola joined the battle for the rights of people with disabilities back when it was still relatively new, while in college in the late 1960s. She was executive director of the advocacy group Center for the Independence of the Disabled in New York from 1983 to 1999 and then spent the next 20 years with Independence Care System, running its advocacy and women’s health program.
Those roles put her in the midst of the push for obvious accommodations like curb cuts in sidewalks and less obvious ones like financing for personal aides for people who need help dressing, bathing and getting in and out of wheelchairs. Over the years her wide range of activities included blocking buses in her wheelchair in transportation-related protests and organizing a singing group for people with disabilities.
This summer she was honored at the opening of a newly renovated radiology unit at NYC Health & Hospitals/Gotham Health in the Morrisania section of the Bronx that typifies her impact. The new unit, equipped with lifts, movable examination tables and a modified mammography machine, is designed to make it easier for women who use wheelchairs or have other disabilities to receive mammograms and obstetric and gynecological care
“Marilyn Saviola’s steadfast advocacy has ensured that the needs of the disability community are at the forefront of health care policy discussions,” Victor Calise, commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office for People With Disabilities, said at the time.
“Our goal is not to get to the front of the bus,” she told The New York Times in 1997, “it is to make government pay for technology to get us on the bus.”
Marilyn Elizabeth Saviola was born July 13, 1945, in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx. Her father, Peter, and mother, Camilla, immigrants from Italy, owned a candy store and luncheonette. But her life changed drastically in August 1955, when she became sick while visiting relatives in Connecticut.
Polio was diagnosed. The first vaccine for it had recently been developed, but she hadn’t yet received it.
“I was supposed to do it when I went back to school in September,” she recalled in an oral history recorded for the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement Oral History Project in 2001.
She was taken to
Willard Parker Hospital in Manhattan.
She spent time in an iron lung and, when she came out of it, had to use a respirator to breathe.
While in college she became involved with others who were turning the activism of the period toward issues faced by people with disabilities.
“We were beginning to get much more militant about our movement,” she said in the oral history. “Wanting for change to occur through the goodness of well-meaning -this wasn’t enough.”