Professor Kudlick Comments on Voting Access for Disabled

SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER -- The disability-rights movement has recast disability, instead, as a problem of society being rigidly designed in ways that exclude people with disabilities. The solution is to fix society. These concepts were, and remain, revolutionary. Catherine Kudlick, History professor at San Francisco State University, says, “There weren’t any laws that explicitly said, ‘You have a disability, so you can’t vote,’ but a presumption that someone was able-bodied was built into the actual voting practices. Disability is at the heart of all thinking about inequality. Women were thought to be irrational and hysterical, African Americans were thought to be intellectually inferior, and many times throughout our histories, the supposed disabilities of different ethnic groups have been evoked as justification for restricting the right to vote.”