Jennifer Campbell Matthews and Dr. Rebecca de Schweinitz, BYU Department of History

In the United States around the early to mid-19th century a debate about the best method to teach the deaf arose which only intensified into the 20th century. The debate consisted of pure oralists who believed that the deaf should be taught speech and lip-reading to the exclusion of signs, manualists who believed that sign-language was a valuable tool for the deaf and should be included, and a number of people who fell somewhere in between the two extremes. For the two decades before and after the turn of the 20th century most deaf leaders as well as a majority of the deaf community promoted the use of sign language, whether coupled with some speech and lip-reading or not, as valuable and essential to deaf people’s success and happiness.

The purpose of my research was to expand my undergraduate capstone paper in which I analyzed what the depictions of deaf women in deaf magazines, more specifically how the articles treated their oralism or manualism, indicated about deaf notions of femininity. I based my conclusions on the limited number of deaf popular magazines available to me, working almost exclusively with the Silent Worker. I argued that deaf male leaders tied ideal deaf feminine beauty to oralism, although not to ideal deaf femininity in general. By analyzing popular magazines available only at Gallaudet University, I hoped to further cement my thesis with more and varied examples.

Considering school and work, I was able to spend four days at Gallaudet researching, with two days built in for travel. Realizing I would be unable to view every publication, I planned to start with the magazines which were more widely read, such as the Deaf-Mute Times, and pick only a random sampling of years rather than trying to look at every issue. At Gallaudet, the librarian was extremely helpful and the microfilms easy to find, yet almost immediately I ran into problems. After spending the first day searching through microfilm of various magazines I had not found one article which specifically highlighted a deaf woman. Articles in the Silent Worker about deaf women had been very sparse, and it seemed as though articles about deaf women in other, less popular magazines would be extremely difficult to find. At this point I decided to look at some of the materials in the archives, including conference proceedings from the National Association of the Deaf (NAD), hoping to find some information on how deaf leaders viewed deaf women.

Although I did not find any direct information from the NAD proceedings about deaf leaders’ views of deaf women, I began to notice an interesting trend. Through my previous research I had concluded that the leaders of the deaf community, most of which were also leaders of the NAD at some point, generally agreed on the importance of manualism in the education of the deaf. What I found, though, suggested that within the deaf leadership the opinions on oralism varied widely, with many prominent members promoting pure oralism or discrediting the use of sign language in the classroom. I further researched the magazine the FRAT, the organ of the Fraternal Society of the Deaf. Although this magazine was not political in nature I found similar tensions between manualism and oralism of the deaf male members. I became interested in how this debate among the almost exclusively male leaders of the deaf evolved into the 20th century, and noticed that staunch promoters of manualism slowly disappeared from the conference proceedings and found their way into more extremist articles of the magazines.

I realized at this point that while I had travelled to Gallaudet to study deaf women’s femininity, what interested me more was how depictions of deaf women reflected deaf men’s masculinity rather than deaf women’s femininity. Realizing this and considering the information available to me, at this point I decided to shift my focus to the deaf male middle-class, more specifically deaf male leaders. I hoped to find a relationship between the atmosphere of debate between oralists and manualists and deaf men’s notions of their masculinity around the turn of the century and into the first few decades of the 20th century.

Since my trip to Gallaudet I have done further research into general masculinity around the turn of the century, as well as compiled and sorted through the research from Gallaudet. I have formed a preliminary thesis which argues that oralism and oralists threatened middle-class deaf men’s masculinity in the decades before and after the turn of 20th century, and their actions and ideology towards the oralist movement was shaped by this threat. My capstone paper which looked at depictions of oralist and manualist deaf women in deaf magazines will make up one section of the paper. The remainder of the paper will considerably expand my original capstone project, bringing in mostly new research.

I am currently working with my faculty advisor in drafting and revising the paper to turn it into an article for publication. Although I had planned on submitting it to the disability conference at San Francisco State University for 2009, I discovered that they only take papers from those currently enrolled in graduate programs. Although I plan on attending a graduate program in the future, my plan for now is to submit the article to a scholarly historical journal by the end of 2008.