SASL Executive Council
2015 – 2017
President
Samuel J. Supalla
University of Arizona
[email protected]
Vice President
Deirdre Schlehofer
Rochester Institute of Technology
[email protected]
Recording Secretary /
Newsletter Editor
Andrew P. J. Byrne
Framingham State University
[email protected]
Treasurer
Harvey Nathanson
Austin Community College
[email protected]
Membership Director
Ron Fenicle
[email protected]
SASL Journal
Editor-in-Chief
Jody H. Cripps
Towson University
[email protected]
Members-at-Large
Russell Rosen
CUNY – Staten Island
[email protected]
Gabriel Arellano
Georgetown University
[email protected]
By Andrew P. J. Byrne
Mabel Bell’s Perspective on
American Sign Language and Deaf People
“I well remember my own feelings of awe, not unmixed with
horror, when I first saw some of these strange [deaf] people.”
((Mabel) Bell, 1898, p. 5)
In the previous issue, I wrote briefly about Mabel Bell,
the deaf wife of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, and her
unskillfulness in fingerspelling and signing in ASL. When
conversing with her husband and other people including the
signing deaf, she used speech, lipreading, and writing. Her
husband was a fluent signer and had interacted with many
signing deaf people for a number of years. What made me
decide to do this piece expanding on Mabel is the quote above
referring to the struggle she had about herself as a deaf
person and other people of her kind.
Mabel was born on November 25, 1857 in Cambridge,
Massachusetts (MA), five miles from Boston. Her parents,
Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Gertrude McCurdy, were
wealthy. At age five, Mabel contracted scarlet fever and
became profoundly deaf (Bishundayal, 2002; Lane, 1984).
Horrified by the fact that their daughter was deaf and that her
life would not be the same as her hearing sisters, Hubbard
and his wife decided that Mabel would not be taught to
communicate through ASL (Pasachoff, 1996). The father later
stated, “If she had not been forced to speak, she would soon
have lost the power entirely” (Bell, 1898, p. 22). Hearing loss
was not seen as a mark of difference, but rather as a
deviation.
It is important to understand that Mabel's parents'
thinking was not an isolated phenomenon. Dr. Samuel Howe,
the first director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind (now
known as the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, MA)
told Mabel's father that “[i]f you want your daughter to be
normal, you must speak to your daughter and she must speak
to you” (Lane, 1984, p. 315). Howe also encouraged him “to
prevent Mabel from associating with any other deaf children,
to forbid her gesturing and even communicating in writing” (p.
315). Hubbard and his wife thus instructed everyone in the
house to speak to Mabel as if she could normally hear and
disregard any signs she might make (Bishundayal, 2002;
Toward, 1996). It appears that her parents attempted >>>>>>
(Continue on the next page)
The Power of ASL
2
Summer 2017 – Issue 6