The level of awareness that Mabel's parents had about language issues as they affected deaf
people is impressively high. Had society been signing (for example, similar to Martha's Vineyard),
Mabel's mother may have had a different opinion. Instead of attending ASD, Mabel was enrolled at
the age of twelve at a private school with her sisters (Bishundayal, 2002; Toward, 1996). This school
was for hearing children only. A few months later, her parents pulled her out of school because,
“although [she] was renowned all her life for her expert lipreading skills, still she was unable to lipread
sufficiently well a teacher addressing a class of hearing children” (Lane, 1984, p. 350). In the
following year, the Hubbard family set off for Europe where they lived and traveled for three years.
Mabel attended an oral school for the deaf in Germany and was later transferred to a day school in
Vienna, Austria. Here the schools are for deaf children only. While Mabel and her sisters visited Italy,
France, and England, they always had teachers with them so that their education would not be
neglected (Bishundayal, 2002; Lane, 1984; Toward, 1996).
In 1873, the sixteen-year-old Mabel and her family returned home to Cambridge, MA. Her
mother was not entirely satisfied with Mabel’s speech skills so she introduced her daughter to Dr.
Bell, who taught vocal physiology at Boston University and worked as a teacher at the Clarke School
for the Deaf (now known as Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech) in Northampton, MA. This
school was new at the time. Mabel met with Bell several
school
times for her speech lessons, but she was mostly taught
by Bell’s assistant, Abby Locke (Bishundayal, 2002;
Toward, 1996). Soon afterwards, Bell and Mabel fell in
love. After their engagement, Bell visited her grandparents
in New York, who were very much pleased by the news
that Bell and Mabel would soon be married. Mabel’s
grandfather had interesting thoughts as follow:
[Her grandfather] realized, perhaps more fully than
her parents, that with her handicap she might never
have an opportunity to marry. In spite of her
intelligence and charm, few young men would wish
to be saddled with a deaf wife. He thought Mabel
extremely fortunate to have become engaged to a
man with such an understanding of the problems of
the deaf. Bell considered her deafness not so much
a handicap as an added challenge to their love.
(Toward, 1996, p. 34)
On July 11, 1877, Bell and Mabel tied the knot in
her parents’ house in Cambridge, MA. By the time they
celebrated their seventh anniversary, they already had
four children, two daughters and two sons. Their boys
died in infancy. When their first child, Elsie, was born, Bell
Mabel as a teen
immediately checked her hearing to make certain that it
Source: Toward, 1996
was normal (Toward, 1996). Bell was relieved by the fact
that Elsie could hear. It is important to note that Bell’s own mother was deaf. Before Bell and Mabel
were married, his mother “adverted to his fiancée’s deafness and expressed fears for [his] children”
(Lane, 1984, p. 340). Like Mabel, Bell’s mother was oral deaf, and her thoughts about life as a deaf
person were negative.
(Continue on the next page)
The Power of ASL
4
Summer 2017 – Issue 6