Deaf HERstory: Making Strides

Abstract

EmergenceTo maintain dominance over a minority group, the dominant social group deprives its victims of their history. Frantz Fanon, a leader of the Algerian resistance to French rule in the 1950s, wrote that colonialism is not satisfied with merely holding a people in its grip ... but by a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of an oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.1 Prevented from appreciating the historical experiences and the achievements of their own people, the colonized are kept powerless. Because African Americans have long understood this deprivation, a civil-rights movement occurred in the mid-twentieth century.This evoked a sense of social consciousness leading to the formation of Black studies.2 A domino effect ensued, and women's studies, disability studies, Chicano/a studies, and other disciplines began to evolve. According to historian Gerda Lerner, being denied equal opportunities brought forth the field of women's studies, which also was engendered by the need to improve women's lives.-3Like the impetus for black studies and women's studies, the field of Deaf studies emerged from the now-famous discovery of the linguistic nature of American Sign Language (ASL) in the mid-1960s.4 The first formal Deaf studies program was created in 1980 at Boston University and was followed by similar initiatives at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), in 1983. Initially a department at Gallaudet University in 1994, Deaf studies became a program when it merged with the ASL program in 2002.Studies of Deaf women began in 1993, when Vicki Hurwitz offered the first Deaf women's studies course at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) as part of her master's degree program in social work.6 The course, which was a historical review of Deaf women's professional and personal lives, included a field trip to the Women's National Hall of Fame Museum in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1996, the next Deaf women's studies course emerged at CSUN with Genie Gertz, who saw a serious gap in the field of Deaf studies.7 Her course consisted of a multidisciplinary analysis of Deaf women in both the Deaf community and American society. Studies of historical, social, political, educational, and economic factors that affected the status of Deaf women were incorporated into Gertz's class.The course included discussions about Deaf women's struggles and successes and examined historical accounts of Deaf women in the context of the Deaf community.Inspired by both Hurwitz and Gertz, I began the first Deaf women's studies course at Gallaudet in 1997. An additional impetus was a general lack of reading materials on the experiences of Deaf females in my women's studies classes at the University of Maryland. In that first Deaf women's studies course at Gallaudet, I quickly learned that the students had no prior knowledge of general herstory,8 forcing a shuffle in the course syllabus. Since then, the course has begun with a brief exploration of hearing herstory, covering suffrage, first with Susan B. Anthony and her cohorts in the late nineteenth century, and later with Alice Paul in the early twentieth century, and finally with activist Betty Friedan in the mid-twentieth century.This course invariably includes a visit to the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument, in which Alice Paul and colleagues lived and worked diligently to cinch the 1920 suffrage victory After this introduction the students shift into an exploration of social, educational, and gendered issues among Deaf women. Finding this approach to be useful in introducing women's studies to the students, I continue to use this strategy two decades later, starting the semester with a quick exploration of hearing herstory and ending with a look into the experiences of Deaf females, especially those of Gallaudet alumnae.ResourcesIn addition to realizing that students had no prior knowledge of general herstory, a dearth of published materials, specifically books about, for, and by Deaf women was another challenge in teaching Deaf women's studies classes. …