In Our Own Hands

Essays in Deaf History, 1780–1970

Brian H. Greenwald, Joseph J. Murray, Brian H. Greenwald, Joseph J. Murray

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781563686610
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This collection of new research examines the development of deaf people's autonomy and citizenship discourses as they sought access to full citizenship rights in local and national settings. Covering the period of 1780–1970, the essays in this collection explore deaf peoples' claims to autonomy in their personal, religious, social, and organizational lives and make the case that deaf Americans sought to engage, claim, and protect deaf autonomy and citizenship in the face of rising nativism and eugenic currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
These essays reveal how deaf people used their agency to engage in vigorous debates about issues that constantly tested the values of deaf people as Americans. The debates overlapped with social trends and spilled out into particular physical and social spaces such as clubs and churches, as well as within families. These previously unexplored areas in Deaf history intersect with important subthemes in American history, such as Southern history, religious history, and Western history.
The contributors demonstrate that as deaf people pushed for their rights as citizens, they met with resistance from hearing people, and the results of their efforts were decidedly mixed. These works reinforce the Deaf community's longstanding desire to be part of the nation. In Our Own Hands contributes to an increased understanding of the struggle for citizenship and expands our current understanding of race, gender, religion, and other trends in Deaf history.

1

Why Give Him a Sign Which Hearing People Do Not Understand … ? Public Discourses about Deafness, 1780–1914

Anja Werner

IN 1876, AN AUTHOR IN THE American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb asked, “Why give him a sign which hearing people do not understand … ?”1 The statement illustrates the extent to which deaf lives were shaped by hearing expectations at that time. In the late nineteenth century, hearing culture was assumed to be the most highly evolved form of human society, and a majority of hearing people expected their deaf compatriots to adjust to the hearing mainstream. Any type of otherness was perceived as an unfortunate mishap and even a threat rather than an alternative way of being. By contrast, hearing people of the early nineteenth century had been more open-minded. Some deaf people like Laurent Clerc alongside hearing teachers of the deaf who promoted signed forms of communication, such as Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, had been respected and visible members of American society. Why, then, the change in public opinion? Why did the hearing majority become unwilling and even unable to realize that deaf people who signed could fully exercise their citizenship?

Based on my examination of roughly 1,200 Anglo-American newspaper and journal articles straddling the years from 1780 to 1914, I would argue that the change coincided with changing access to information about deafness. By the mid-nineteenth century, mentions of deaf people in mainstream periodicals significantly decreased. At the same time, more and more deaf periodicals were being founded. These deaf papers represented deaf self-consciousness. It was a reply to hearing strategies of exclusion as an oralist lobby was gaining strength and the hearing public’s opinion shifted from favoring the manual method to preferring the oral method in educating deaf children. The oral method was also perceived to be more modern and grounded in the latest scientific discoveries.2

Since Harlan Lane’s 1984 When the Mind Hears, deaf and hearing historians alike have added considerably to our understanding of deaf agency in the nineteenth century.3 My goal was not so much to trace deaf history, as to examine a specific type of source for its significance in understanding the dynamics between hearing and deaf people.4 In this chapter, I first describe my overall research of nineteenth-century newspapers, which focused on different journals and recurrent themes. I subsequently share a few examples of how discussions about deafness changed over the decades. In doing so, I focus on references to deaf people in mainstream—that is, hearing—periodicals rather than the deaf press. While the idea of “citizenship” was not discussed then as a tool to understanding hearing-deaf relations, it can help us today in examining hearing people’s perceptions of deaf people and their tactics of exclusion despite ongoing deaf activism to fight such attitudes.

Articles and Recurrent Themes

I found nearly 1,200 articles from American, British, and Irish periodicals in a systematic search of available online-databases like Journal Storage and those of the American Antiquarian Society. In this chapter, I focus mainly on American sources. However, it was not always possible to identify with certainty a source as British or American in its origin. Moreover, the online-databases are biased with regard to the resources from which they draw their materials. Articles from the “silent press” that came up in my search do not amount to a systematic and comprehensive list. The fact that such articles did come up does, however, allow for conclusions with regard to general trends. For instance, a growing tendency to discuss deaf culture exclusively in publications by and for deaf people may be discerned, while hearing readers increasingly found oralist perspectives reflected in hearing journals.

I included articles from weekly and monthly journals as well as from daily newspapers. The articles cover a broad range of topics, whereby references to deafness could be both literal and metaphorical. Common sayings such as the expression “to be deaf to an idea” were also traced. Some articles were brief notes on new publications; others amounted to detailed analyses of twenty pages and more. Most articles averaged either the length of a typical newspaper column or two to three journal pages. British and American journals shared information by reprinting articles from the other side of the Atlantic or simply by writing about institutions in both countries. References to periodicals in other European languages were also found. In the United States, articles were often reprinted repeatedly in different journals. Frequently a certain periodical published a number of articles on deafness in the course of a few years or even decades.

In the course of time, articles about deafness and deaf people appeared in journals that addressed very diverse readerships. In other words, different (hearing) professionals succeeded one another in discussing deaf issues. For instance, a significant number of the early articles were found in church newspapers, while many later articles were published in scientific journals. This finding supports the fact that a shift occurred with regard to explaining the need for deaf education, which changed from the idea of providing deaf people with an access to religion to assimilating them into hearing society on the basis of medico-scientific findings. Moreover, for specific decades recurring themes may be traced. Then again, some subjects appear to have been news throughout the century. Among the latter are, of course, discussions of manual and oral methods, excerpts or entire reports from schools for deaf children as well as descriptions of alternative teaching methods. Sometimes the articles addressed clearly defined audiences, such as those of youth, Sunday school, and ladies’ journal readers. Poems and stories about deaf people appeared in these journals to teach hearing children and women how to lead good, moral lives. The ladies’ journals in particular through the decades touched upon issues of caring about and teaching deaf people.5

Among the various alternatives in instructing deaf people that were discussed, visual alphabets—such as the manual alphabet or finger spelling (dactylology)—seemed especially useful in order to facilitate communication on the basis of vocal languages. Besides the one- and two-handed alphabets, educators devised syllabic alphabets in the 1830s.6 But in the 1860s, alternatives to what was then referred to as “gestures” were sought. Some experimented with the Morse alphabet in combination with drums.7 Then again, Thomas Gallaudet, a son of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, designed alphabets of smell, taste, and even moods to be used in the dark, which were as creative as they were impracticable.8 But spelling out entire conversations was tedious. Moreover, hearing people had invented manual alphabets long before they became a means to communicate with deaf people.9 Pictures were employed as well. Especially in Germany, so The Deaf Mutes’ Friend informed its American readers, “there have been prepared, expressly for the mute, hundreds of pictures illustrating the common objects and employments of life.”10

Some articles appeared—upon first glance—in curious publication venues, such as agricultural journals. However, farming was one way for a deaf person to make a living, which also meant that deaf farmers might have subscribed to farmers’ papers.11 At least one of these papers, The Western Farmer & Gardener, may actually have been aimed for a deaf audience, for it not only printed the “Alphabet of the Deaf and Dumb,” but also discussed “Advantages of Being Deaf” during the 1850s.12 Then again, Our Dumb Animals, which in 1874 asked “Are Our Dumb Animals Deaf?,” was not part of the “silent press.” An article in his journal praised a “deaf and dumb teamster” who was able to manage his oxen much better than his hearing colleagues even though he could not yell at them—he had trained his oxen well.13

Articles in law reviews illustrate to what extent hearing persons shifted from perceiving deaf persons in court as mere curiosities and material for entertaining stories to viewing them as a threat to the accustomed order of hearing society.14, 15 This threat, apparently, had to be dispelled by ridiculing deaf people and by something that, with hindsight, might be termed pseudo-science. The shift seems to have occurred during the 1850s, incidentally a time when articulate deaf people thrived. Articles in law reviews and related journals were comparatively rare—I found eight in journals such as The Monthly Law Reporter and The American Law Register: one in 1830, three in the 1850s, and one each in 1867, 1881, 1897, and 1904. The low number of such articles might be explained to some extent by the above-mentioned possible bias of my search. But it might also be a statement on the low importance of deaf matters in hearing mainstream society. In the 1850s, curiosity about deafness as well as rising fears of capable deaf people might have motivated the writing of articles on a “deaf juryman” and “competency of witnesses,” which also discussed the appropriateness of deafness for an active role in a trial.16

An increasing trend toward a more scientific approach to deafness may be observed by the time of the 1880s. In 1881, Davis Smith analyzed the “Contributory Negligence by Persons with Defective S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Why Give Him a Sign Which Hearing People Do Not Understand … ? Public Discourses about Deafness, 1780–1914
• 2 “Enlightened Selfishness”: Gallaudet College and Deaf Citizenship in the United States, 1864–1904
• 3 Citizenship and Education: The Case of the Black Deaf Community
• 4 From Deaf Autonomy to Parent Autonomy in the Chicago Public Day Schools, 1874–1920
• 5 “Are We Not as Much Citizens as Any Body?” Alice Taylor Terry and Deaf Citizenship in the Early Twentieth Century
• 6 Unchurched, Unchampioned, and Undone: The St. Ann’s Church Controversy, 1894–1897
• 7 In Pursuit of Citizenship: Campaigns Against Peddling in Deaf America, 1880s–1950s
• 8 Revisiting the Memoir: Contesting Deaf Autonomy and the Real Tragedy of Alexander Graham Bell
• 9 Compromising for Agency: The Role of the NAD during the American Eugenics Movement, 1880–1940
• 10 Normalization and Abnormal Genes: Hereditary Deafness Research at the Clarke School for the Deaf, 1930–1950
• 11 The “Breakaways”: Deaf Citizens’ Groups in Australia in the 1920s and 1930s
• 12 Divine and Secular: Reverend Robert Capers Fletcher and the Southern Deaf Community, 1931–1972
• Contributors
• Index