In Search of Monkey Girl: Disability, Child Welfare, and the Freak Show in Ontario in the 1970s

Abstract

In this article, we examine the brief exhibition of and public debate over “The Monkey Girl” exhibit at the intersection of the freak show, disability, and child welfare in the 1960s and 1970s. The critical moment was triggered by the limited but powerful outcry against the exhibition of a five-year-old girl (identified only as Pookie) as The Monkey Girl at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in 1973. We argue that wider shifts in understandings of child welfare—particularly, the notion of the best interests of the child, a standard for the determination of child custody in divorce cases, which places emphasis on the well-being of children, not the rights of parents—as well as the emergence of poverty and disability rights movements provided the impetus to end the freak show at Canada’s largest exhibition. By the time of Pookie’s display in the early 1970s, calls for inclusion of people with what was then known as mental retardation had hit the national agenda, along with issues of poverty and child abuse.