Books: ‘The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public’
January 27th, 2009From the New York Times:
Susan Schweik, professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, explores historic attitudes toward people with disabilities in her upcoming book, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, to be released this spring by New York University Press.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cities across the nation passed “ugly laws” that targeted unsightly beggars and seemed to criminalize disability itself.
Before social welfare laws, some disabled people had no choice but to beg, Professor Schweik said. “It was a status system,” she said of the law’s enforcement. “Unsightliness was illegal for people without means.”
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