We have returned from lunch, and we’re all ready for the afternoon sessions. Dirksen Bauman is now introducing Edna Sayers [Lois Bragg] and Diana Gates, who will present on “Lydia Sigourney.”

[It is a lecture combined with PowerPoint, but it does mean that there is considerable information both on the screen and directly from Bragg and Gates, which means sometimes it’s hard to figure out which you should be paying attention to.]

The education of Alice Cogswell and the foundations of deaf education are portrayed as a noble act by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. This is what Paddy Ladd calls “the Grand Narrative,” where Deaf communities are constructed solely as the end products of hearing educators.

Nowadays we consider Laurent Clerc as a founder of Deaf education in the United States, but our assertion is that these two gentlemen wouldn’t have gotten as far as they did without Lydia Sigourney and the Cogswells.

The 19th century had restrictive roles for women, but it was also a period of change for women—Lydia Huntley Sigourney played a vital role in history of deaf education. She was also the first woman to be self sufficient through writing, and the first successful teacher of deaf child in America.

Bragg and Gates now compare a number of years in the lives of the three central figures: Alice Cogswell, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, and Lydia Sigourney [and to a lesser extent, Laurent Clerc]. For example, in the year 1807, Alice became deaf, Clerc taught alongside Sicard, Gallaudet studied law and literature, and became a traveling salesman, and Lydia, who was aged 16, started a school in her hometown.

By 1809, Alice was attending school, but there’s further information on her education. In 1812, Mason Fitch Cogswell contacted the Braidwoods, but got no response. Gallaudet, meanwhile, lived at home, tried different jobs, but then decided to enter the Andover Seminary and prepare for the ministry.

The famous “hat story” was probably not true. It seems to have originated with Lewis Weld, who didn’t meet Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet until 1818. The Cogswell family historian, Grace Cogswell Root, also concurs and says this story probably apocryphal. But while Gallaudet is at Andover, he became interested in deaf people.

It seems that Alice and her family communicated via home signs, according to a February 1812 letter that indicates that there was some sort of fingerspelling method used. By the seminal year of 1814, Alice was nine; Gallaudet was 27, a recent graduate of Andover, and ready to preach; and Lydia at age 23 was teaching in Norwich, Connecticut. In that same year of 1814, Daniel Wadsworth, with whose family Lydia Sigourney was friends with, suggested she open a school in Hartford. Wadsworth selected fifteen pupils and also maintained waiting list. The Cogswell sisters Mary Elizabeth and Alice were students; apparently Wadsworth saw Alice as educable.

So how did Lydia Sigourney manage to mainstream Alice? In 1814, Sigourney stated: “Having no guidance in the specialties of instruction for deaf people, I was aided by her classmates in using signs.”

Sigourney thus built on visual communication; her signing wasn’t based on actual language but on a mix of abstract representations and fingerspelling. It appears their signing was fairly sophisticated given the situation. But we should assume that the fingerspellling is the same system that the Cogswell family used.

At end of Alice’s first year with Huntley, Cogswell advanced with a new plan. In April 1815 was Cogswell’s planning session for a new school. We believe that Alice’s progress with Lydia Sigourney meant that her father realized that a school was needed and was now feasible. Because he still couldn’t contact the Braidwoods, he forged ahead on his own and asked Gallaudet to travel to Europe. While Gallaudet was in Europe, Alice continued with Sigourney.

There were letters from Alice in the summer of 1815, and they were addressed to Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. They were written a year after she started with Sigourney. In September, 1815, Mason Cogswell wrote to Alice’s cousin Harriet and enclosed a letter from Alice. The story and letters written by Alice reflect a syntax of signed language [the letters are being shown on the PowerPoint presentation, and are not on the screen for very long] Gallaudet wrote back and praised Alice for her writing – he returned with Clerc in 1816, but school didn’t open until 1817.

Alice transferred from the educational guidance of Sigourney to the hands of Clerc and Gallaudet. Because the two teachers didn’t have to deal with fourteen other pupils in a different language, now
Alice’s English improved. Her English shows improvement after eight months with Gallaudet and Clerc, but still shows the influence of signing syntax.

35 years later, in 1851, the school is now a success. Alice is dead, and now so is Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. The keynote speaker at the memorial service for Gallaudet was Henry Barnard, a Yale graduate and Hartford resident who was editor of the American Journal of Education. We can now see the overarching influence of Yale-educated men and the removal of Sigourney from the narrative. While Sigourney is at the memorial service, and is now a renowned poet, she is not recognized to the full extent. Barnard acknowledges Sigourney’s role in the early education of Alice, but shifted the narrative to Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, and Barnard presents Alice as a tabula rasa prior to meeting Gallaudet and Clerc, and paints Gallaudet as the savior, completely discounting Sigourney.

Lewis Weld, another Yale graduate, was recruited in 1818 by Thomas Gallaudet to work at ASD; he married Mary Cogswell, Alice’s older sister, and in 1830 became principal of ASD. He too picked up Barnard’s narrative and recounted the now famous hat story. There’s now an element of male dominance, and the rejection of women as anything other than the pupil in question.

The family historian Grace Cogswell Root stated that we will never “know the relative importance of the past played by Alice’s two teachers, Miss Huntley and the Reverend Gallaudet…”

My Commentary: It was apparent from the quick, furtive interaction between Bragg and Gates that they had to leave quite a bit out. Nevertheless, their presentation reminds us that there are often two sides to a story, and it is important to include Sigourney again in the overall narrative. The primary weaknesses of this presentation was the rushed use of PowerPoint slides matched by a hurried lecture. In any conference, there is usually an approximately 20 minute time limit, so it becomes necessary to boil any presentation down to one or two essential facts. Additionally, the time line was interesting, but it would have been far more helpful to try to understand more about Sigourney’s relationship with Alice, her relationships with Gallaudet and Clerc, if any, and her role in education, if any, after she passed Alice over to Gallaudet and Clerc. Additionally, at a time when men worked as teachers more often than females, it would be interesting to explore Sigourney’s pioneering role in education to a further extent. Still, this was an excellent presentation and both debunks some myths and adds some solid realities to the origins of Deaf education, which often doubles as a cultural “origin” story for the Deaf community.