Lucy Gwin
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Lucy Gwin | |
|---|---|
 Lucy Gwin, from the 1960 yearbook of Thomas Carr Howe Community High School | |
| Born | January 5, 1943 Beech Grove, Indiana |
| Died | October 30, 2014 (aged 71) Washington, Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | Disability rights activist |
Lucy Gwin (January 5, 1943 – October 30, 2014) was an American disability rights activist. She published Mouth, a disability rights magazine.
Gwin was born in Beech Grove, Indiana,[1] the daughter of Robert Willard Gwin[2] and Verna Bodine Gilcher Gwin. Her father worked in advertising and her mother was a teacher who later designed window displays for department stores.[3] She graduated from Thomas Carr Howe Community High School in Indianapolis in 1960.[4]
Career
Gwin ran a restaurant in Rochester, New York and wrote advertising copy as a young woman.[5] She wrote a "strong and vivid"[6] memoir, Going Overboard (1982), about her year spent working on an oil rig ferry in the Gulf of Mexico.[7][8] She was working on another book, tentatively titled The Marriage Conspiracy, and lecturing on the subject of marriage, in the mid-1980s.[9]
Gwin was disabled following a car accident in 1989. The abuses she witnessed in her stay at a rehabilitation facility afterward fueled her concern for the rights of institutionalized people. The facility was eventually closed as a result of her efforts and the investigations that followed. In 1990 she began publishing Mouth, a disability rights magazine.[10][11] "She gave a place for what would be perceived as a radical disability rights voice, and she was fierce in that voice", explained colleague Bruce Darling in a 2021 article. "Everyone was a little scared of her."[7] She worked closely with photographer Tom Olin and writers Josie Byzek and Dave Hingsburger, among others.[10] Mouth ran for 109 issues, before it ceased publication in 2008.[7]
Gwin joined other disability rights activists in protesting the legalization of assisted suicide outside the Supreme Court in 1997, telling a reporter "I'm not going to die for Jack Kevorkian or anybody just because they think I'm not pretty to look at".[12]