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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

deaf women, deaf magazines, speech and lip-reading, sign-language, deaf community

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

History

Abstract

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.

Included in

History Commons

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