How the Ugly Laws were designed to keep disabled people out of sight

Today first takes us to the lovely Portland Oregon where we’re learning about “The Ugly Laws” that were created to stop disabled people from being seen in public and “obstructing the roadways.” For people with visible disabilities, this history will not sound surprising, considering how entitled the public feels to comment on the way disability looks. Anyone who looks different, or out of the ordinary deals with whispers and comments every time they step outside their home. But at one time, disabled people who looked different were actually forbidden to leave their homes. 

The Ugly Laws

You may have heard mention of these laws before, and thought “no, that can’t possibly be true,” people can’t be THAT horrible. Well, as the past year has taught us, yes, yes they can.

So-called “ugly laws” were mostly municipal statutes in the United States that outlawed the appearance in public of people who were, in the words of one of these laws, “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object”¹ (Chicago City Code 1881)

San Francisco and Chicago seem to have gotten the ball rolling on the Ugly Laws, but Portland was not far behind when it enacted its own Ugly Laws the same year.

 

Previous articles in this series:

Disabled Women in History: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Civil Rights Movement

Disabled Women in History: Rosemary Kennedy and the Lobotomy

Disabled Women in History: Florence Nightingale and Fibromyalgia

 

What was the reason for the Ugly Laws?

People are so terrified of being disabled, they will blame disabled people for their own suffering in order to live in denial. However, the history books say that people were tired of the disabled getting in their way and hanging out on the street. Possibly they were trying to discourage the poor disabled from asking for money.

Through the creation of anti-begging ordinances, city officials perhaps unwittingly, drew distictions between deserving people with disabilites (those with money) and the undeserving, ugly, unsightly, and disgusting people with disabilities (those without). The laws also penalized people for whom street begging or peddling was often the only way to make a living.¹

Basically, that means that healthy people got tired of being reminded of the existence of disabled people. They really preferred that disabled people go hide somewhere out of the way. They specifically target poor people with visible disabilities though. People who got in the way by making them feel bad every time they walked by and saw a disabled person living on the street. 

People are so terrified of being disabled, they will blame disabled people for their own suffering in order to live in denial. Click To Tweet

Chicago’s Ugly Laws and the different ways of punishing disabled women for existing

Portland was far from the only city to have Ugly Laws. There’s a fantastic article from the Chicago Tribune about the city’s ugly laws. At the time no one really knew what to do with disabled people even though they were considered “obstructions.”. The workhouse model (as seen in Oliver Twist) had such a bad reputation no one wanted to go near those places. Yet Chicago’s Ugly Laws made life difficult for those who were blind, deaf, or “disfigured.” The Chicago Police even targeted “ugly” beggars and poured acid on them in 1902.

The city officials were afraid that the disabled would scare women. They didn’t consider disabled women as women, they were seen as an “other” category. Many disabled women with families that could afford it were hidden away in their homes out of sight or sent to asylums for the penalty of existing. Having a physical disability was absolutely enough of a reason to be sent to an asylum, though it usually happened to white women and not men or women of color (women of color, many of which were still slaves at this time, were too valuable to men as workers). 

Chicago’s Ugly Laws were removed in 1974.

Mother Hastings was a victim of the Ugly Laws

This is the short story of a woman referred to as “Mother Hastings.” All we know about her is that she was disabled and she lived in Portland, Oregon. After the Ugly Laws were passed Oregon officials told her she was “too terrible a sight for the children to see.”  She replied:

“They meant my crippled hands, I guess…they gave me money to get out of town².”

She apparently had no family willing to take care of her, she was cast out by society and left to survive on her own for having what sounds like arthritis. Officials told her she had to move to Los Angelos (where they were considering their own Ugly Laws), and they gave her a bus ticket. Unfortunately for her, she had no choice but to listen to the officials because she was poor, disabled, and had nowhere else to go.

So often disabled people are pushed out of sight by those who fear disabled bodies. Click To Tweet

The Ugly Laws ties to eugenics

The Ugly Laws were passed at the beginning of the U.S. eugenics movement. According to History.com, 

Eugenics is the practice or advocacy of improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by “breeding out” disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population.

The Ugly Laws were created because people didn’t like looking at the “undesirable,” which is the same concept as eugenics. Because not only did people not want to see disabled people, but they also didn’t want disabled people to exist at all. So-called experts tried to stop “undesirable populations” from having any children, popularizing forced sterilization for disabled people and for women of color (like Fannie Lou Hamer whose experienced a Mississippi Appendectomy). Forced sterilization only ended in the 1980s. 

The Ugly Laws and the connection to today

I cannot help but compare Mother Hastings’s plight to the homeless of today who are often disabled and are frequently given bus tickets to other cities because officials don’t know what to do with them. This tells the homeless and disabled they’re too ugly, too inconvenient, and too bothersome to exist. 

In the UK, 6 in 10 Covid deaths in 2020 were disabled people. Disabled women were 3.5 times more likely to die of Covid19 than non-disabled women.  Click To Tweet

Society pushed the disabled out of sight because it fears disabled bodies. This isn’t something relegated to history and the Ugly Laws, it’s still happening now. Many are saying that the pandemic isn’t a big deal because only the old and disabled die. Many clearly believe the disabled aren’t even people. Meanwhile, society is casually throwing away the lives of the disabled because they want to eat in restaurants and not be inconvenienced by a piece of fabric on their face. According to the BBC: 

In the UK in 2020, 6 out of 10 Covid deaths were disabled people. Disabled women were 3.5 times more likely to die of Covid19 than non-disabled women. 

In the U.S. I couldn’t even find statistics on the deaths of physically disabled, only those with intellectual disabilities. According to NPR, intellectually disabled people die at a higher rate than any other population. These are the people who show on county health statistics as deaths with preexisting conditions like that excuses the fact that they died. 

In the U.S. people with intellectual disabilities are twice as likely to die from Covid 19 as the rest of the population. 

Clearly, our society still has a problem with how it treats and values the disabled. This is why learning history is so important. When history is ignored, we’re doomed to repeat it. 

 

 

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Sources

1. A disability history of the United States by Kim E. Nielson
2. Kicked to the Curb: Ugly Law Then and Now By Susan Schweik
3. San Francisco once pioneered America’s cruelest legislation: Ugly laws by Katie Dowd
4. The Woman they could not silence by Kate Moore
5. The Ugly Truth: What happens when the government enforces beauty standards? By Amber Vittoria
6. Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States
7. Covid: Disabled people account for 6 in 10 Covid deaths last year
8. COVID-19 Infections And Deaths Are Higher Among Those With Intellectual Disabilities