Taking disability rights seriously

Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames, The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001, xxix +278 pp. Ruth O'Brien, Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, xiv +288 pp. Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003, ix +278 pp. Mary Johnson, Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve, and the Case against Disability Rights, Louisville: Avocado Press, 2003, xvii +296 pp. Old political science is characterized by exclusion: exclusion of people who “don't matter,” sometimes on account of where they live, on account of gender, on account of ethnicity, and sometimes on account of other factors. One such factor, disability, has too often been neglected by political scientists and our students.