Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

< previous page
page_10
next page >
Page Mabel Hubbard would later marry Alexander Graham Bell, whose support of oralism enabled its adherents to gain enormous power and control over the education of deaf people in the United States.
Biographers, educators, and historians have written extensively about the rift that eventually developed between Thomas
Hopkins Gallaudet's son, Edward Miner Gallaudet (who continued his father's work, and Alexander Graham Bell. Richard
Winefield's account, Never the Twain Shall Meet, shows that the clash was almost inevitable given the life experiences of these two men. Both had deaf mothers who had thrived under different methods of instruction. And both had strong, dedicated fathers who had blazed different trails for their sons.
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was married to Sophia Fowler, one of his deaf students, who had lost her hearing too early in life to develop speech. Sophia had progressed academically with exposure to manual signing, although she never learned to read and write very well, having received no formal education before the age of nineteen. Gallaudet had immediately recognized her intelligence and admired her beauty, and their long, happy marriage was testimony to Gallaudet's comfort and confidence in signing as a means of communication. Sophia Fowler Gallaudet was never entirely comfortable in hearing society, but she succeeded brilliantly as a homemaker and mother and, in middle age, as matron of her son's college. She and Gallaudet had four sons and four daughters.
Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet remained devoted to deaf education until his death in 1851, and his son Edward Miner Gallaudet,
after a brief career in banking, continued the tradition. Edward recalled that he was twelve years old when his father suggested that "perhaps I might like to take up the work which had engaged the energies of his early manhood. He spoke at some length of the joy he had in doing what he believed was his Master's work when he labored for the deaf and said he believed I would never be sorry if I carried out his suggestion" Edward Miner Gallaudet was only twenty years old in 1857 when he assumed leadership of the Columbia Institution for the
Deaf and Dumb and the Blind in Washington, DC. (A college was added to the institution in 1864, named Gallaudet College

Download 2.48 Mb.

Share with your friends: