Farr, Susan Elizabeth Decker

Born deaf at St. Catherines, ON; deafness diagnosed at age 2. Attended the St. Mary's School for Deaf Children, then the Ontario School for the Deaf. Varied jobs, mainly office support work and bookkeeping. Married, then divorced, Bill Whyte, a deaf man; second husband was hearing. Shielded from her Deaf identity all through childhood and adolescence, she discovered it during the 1980s and became an activist for deaf persons and Deaf culture, taking her own deaf daughters out of mainstreamed school programs and into the E.C. Drury School for the Deaf, though not without having to fight the authorities. Taught ASL at night; active in political movements for the deaf.