In The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, Susan Schweik writes, “My aim here is threefold: first, to provide a fuller account of the story of unsightly subjects than has yet been written; second, to rethink aspects of U.S. culture through the insights of disability theory (and in turn to rethink aspects of disability studies through an encounter with the history of the American ugly); and finally, to illuminate the conditions of disability – and municipal law’s constitution of those conditions – in the late nineteenth century and at the century’s turn, so as to better understand law, culture, and disability in the present” (pg. 2). Schweik believes that “it was probably more the norm than the exception for this law to show up on the code books of American cities sometime in the late nineteenth or very early twentieth century” (pg. 3). Those who implemented the law did so in a manner suggesting that disability was the problem of individuals, rather than something requiring a reworking of “broader social inequalities” (pg. 5). In her work, Schweik draws upon the ugly law terminology coined by Marcia Pearce Burgdorf and Robert Burgdorf Jr. (pg. 7). Others historians, such as Rosemarie Garland Thomson in her Extraordinary Bodies, examined the law in a passing manner, but Schweik forefronts it, focusing specifically on Chicago’s 1911 law, which has taken on mythic status in disability studies. In her focus, Schweik chooses “to embrace a model of disability, broadly construed, as a political process. Hence, [she focuses] on a particular form of political behavior, a blatantly conventionally political moment, the passing and implementation of a law, in order to understand that political event in the context of modern disability formation” (pg. 11).
Schweik writes of the intersectionality of her model, “Gender, race, sexuality, religion, and national identity are inexorably intertwined with disability and class in the culture(s) of ugly law, producing a variety of ugly identities, both at each specific moment of ordinance enforcement…and in the broader social order that framed, ignored, fought over, and accepted the state and city codes” (pg. 141). The laws’ most flagrant violation of due process involved the interpretation of female beauty. The laws examined women’s “lack of attraction and beauty,” as well as “leanness and stoutness, shortness and tallness,” if they were awkward, the condition of their hair, the size of their breasts, and whether or not they dressed pleasantly (pg. 145). In attempting to limit the mobility of women, the laws created categories for which any women could face arrest. Schweik continues, “Cities across the country…embedded the ugly law specifically within a matrix of codes concerning local purity: decency and exhibition, gender and sexuality…These patterns of codification make clear that the ugly law was intrinsically tied to laws of sex and gender” (pg. 144). While male vagrancy and “ugliness” usually involved missing limbs or severe injury, many laws defined female ugliness in terms of variance from idealized female beauty, equating the display of these differences with prostitution and other women whom society viewed as out of their place (pg. 145). These laws, which defined any physical or sexual aberrance as criminal, reinforced notions of white male superiority. ( )