Genetics, Disability, and Deafness

True Love and Sympathy”: The Deaf-Deaf Marriages Debate in Transatlantic Perspective

42 “TRUE LOVE AND SYMPATHY” The Deaf-Deaf Marriages Debate in Transatlantic Perspective Joseph J. Murray “I desire to draw attention to the fact that in this country deaf-mutes marry deaf-mutes,” said Alexander Graham Bell in his opening presentation to the November 1883 session of the American National Academy of Sciences.1 The enormity of this fact “consumed the entire morning session” of this mid-year meeting of America’s most eminent scientists and thinkers, who were apparently fascinated by the potenThis essay has benefited considerably from the input of a number of scholars. Douglas Baynton and Linda Kerber gave nuanced, detailed, and always-encouraging feedback on this project from its earliest stages. Johanna Schoen offered in-depth comments on the organization of this essay and shared her knowledge of the U.S. eugenics movement. Jeffrey Cox, Lisa Heineman, Paul Greenough, and Shelton Stromquist offered insightful observations on various drafts. An earlier version of this paper benefited from comments received at the German Historical Institute’s 2003 Young Scholar’s Forum. I am grateful to this community of scholars for their willingness to share their time and ideas. tial implications of these marriages “in the formation of a deaf variety of the human race.”2 Bell’s paper provoked an intense decades-long debate within Western Deaf communities and among professionals who worked with Deaf people.3 British and American educators had long corresponded with one another on Deaf-Deaf marriages; a leading British educator declared in 1857: “it is . . . highly inexpedient that the deaf and dumb should marry with each other.”4 Within the field of Deaf education, DeafDeaf marriages was an occasional topic of inquiry, but it was not until Bell’s 1883 paper that hereditary deafness came into wider public attention .5 Bell updated the National Academy at its next three annual meetings , and his ideas found resonance among these scientists and the general public, influenced by growing concern over the purity of national peoples.6 In the context of heredity science and its practical application in the field of public health, Deaf-Deaf marriages were reconceptualized as a menace to Western society. While the debate over Deaf-Deaf marriages took place in specific nation-states, the ideas informing these national debates circulated across national boundaries. Belying conceptions of minorities as locked into specific localities and employing purely locally based resistance, Deaf people in the United States and Great Britain also shared ideas with one another to counter opposition to their right to marry whom they chose. Their actions illustrate both the ability of and limits facing a small, geographically scattered minority to retain control of their own lives in the face of larger stigmatizing beliefs. Deaf people in the United States and Britain debated the marriages issue at international conferences , in Deaf community periodicals, and during transatlantic journeys . This exchange of ideas forged a common strategy of response by Deaf people in the United States and Great Britain against attempts to paint them as hereditarily tainted.7 Deaf people rejected the notion that a “deaf-mute race” would result from Deaf-Deaf marriages. Their lived experiences suggested that the overwhelming majority of Deaf children came from hearing parents, and a similarly large majority of Deaf couples had hearing children. Indeed, research initiated as a result of the debate would show that more than 90 percent of Deaf couples had hearing children.8 Deaf people also harnessed tropes of domesticity to present Deaf-Deaf marriages as ordinary middle-class marriages. Claiming that Deaf-Deaf 43 “TRUE LOVE AND SYMPATHY” marriages were happier than Deaf-hearing marriages, Deaf people stressed a traditional right of citizenship: the right of men to enter a domestic sphere of their own making.9 Both of these arguments lent support to a fundamental premise underlying the Deaf response; the perceived threat of Deaf-Deaf marriages did not warrant trampling the individual rights of Deaf people in favor of an alleged national good. Eugenics was not a clearly delineated scientific field at the time of the Deaf-Deaf marriages debate. Indeed Francis Galton only coined the word eugenics in the same year as Bell’s New Haven address.10 What existed in the 1880s and 1890s was a loose international network of corresponding scholars and scientists interested in the transmission of hereditary traits and its impact on particular nations or groups of people . Scientists working on questions of heredity often...