ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how disability legislation over recent decades, in particular the implementation of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 was believed to have impacted on women's mental well-being. In signalling a radical shift in thinking about disability in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the social model of disability recast disability as a form of social oppression and threw a spotlight on the need for societal change and the removal of socially created barriers and all forms of institutional discrimination which had dominated for many decades. Within the social model impairment is defined as functional limitations which affect a person's body whilst disability is defined as loss or limitations of opportunities arising from direct and indirect discrimination. Likewise, women acknowledged the progress made in recent decades in making public transport accessible to disabled people and in particular to wheelchair-users who historically had been unable to access buses, trains etc. and which was widely welcomed.
