The murky history behind municipal laws criminalizing disability
In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, municipal laws targeting "unsightly beggars" sprang up in cities across America. Seeming to criminalize disability and thus offering a visceral example of discrimination, these “ugly laws” have become a sort of shorthand for oppression in disability studies, law, and the arts.
In this watershed study of the ugly laws, Susan M. Schweik uncovers the murky history behind the laws, situating the varied legislation in its historical context and exploring in detail what the laws meant. Illustrating how the laws join the history of the disabled and the poor, Schweik not only gives the reader a deeper understanding of the ugly laws and the cities where they were generated, she locates the laws at a crucial intersection of evolving and unstable concepts of race, nation, sex, class, and gender. Moreover, she explores the history of resistance to the ordinances, using the often harrowing life stories of those most affected by their passage. Moving to the laws’ more recent history, Schweik analyzes the shifting cultural memory of the ugly laws, examining how they have been used—and misused—by academics, activists, artists, lawyers, and legislators.
Susan M. Schweik is Professor of English and co-director of the Disability Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War.
Table of Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 The Emergence of the Ugly Laws
1 Producing the Unsightly 23
2 Getting Ugly 40
3 The Law in Context 63
4 The Law in Language 89
5 Dissimulations 108
II At the Unsightly Intersection
6 Gender, Sexuality, and the Ugly Law 141
7 Immigration, Ethnicity, and the Ugly Law 165
8 Race, Segregation, and the Ugly Law 184
III The End of the Ugly Laws
9 The Right to the City 207
10 Rehabilitating the Unsightly 230
11 All about Ugly Laws (for Ten Cents) 255
Conclusion 279
Appendix The Ugly Laws 291
Notes 297
Bibliography 351
Index 405
About the Author 431
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
“In analyzing the ugly laws, Schweik revelas how individuals have come to define their identities around work and self-sufficiency, and how the failure of those with disabilities to do so can result in character assassination of these individuals as frauds and morally bankrupt, diseased tricksters and thieves. A subtle and complex study.” -CHOICE
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“Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. The stark photo by Paul Strand illustrating The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public conveys perfectly the realities and subtleties described in its pages—including the fear, pity, and revulsion with which the public so often regards those with physical disabilities.” -California Lawyer,
“Overall, this is a thorough, careful, and sensible work, which is both fascinating and also moving as an account of social oppression of disabled people.” -Metapsychology Online Reviews
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"Standing at the intersection of "disability history" and "poor people's history," The Ugly Laws opens a window on an attractive landscape for scholars to explore."-The Journal of American History,
"Shweik combines a sophisticated grasp of disability, critical race and social theory, extensive archival and legal research, close textual analysis, and broad reading in a wide range of historical and other literatures. Her account brings the insights of disability history and theory to bear on systems of exclusion, subordination, and othering more generally in American life as the United States entered the twentieth century... This is a powerful book, essential reading for scholars of disability, race, gender, sexuality, immigration, urban, legal, social movement, and twentieth-century history more generally— indeed, for anyone concerned about law and its power and the limits of that power to define borders of belonging."-American Historical Review
