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The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. By Susan M. Schweik. (New York: New York University Press, 2009. xiv, 431 pp. $35.00, isbn 978-08147-4057-6.)
An 1881 Chicago ordinance mandated that
Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares, or public places in this city, shall not therein or thereon expose himself to public view, under the penalty of a fine of $1 for each offense, (pp. 1-2)
Neither those responsible for such laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nor those whom they targeted called them "ugly laws." However, this dramatic term coined by two contemporary legal scholars was appropriated by Susan M. Schweik for her volume on "unsightly beggar ordinances," municipal legislation that forbade disabled people from appearing in public spaces and displaying their disabilities for the purposes of arousing sympathy...