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Deaf and unwanted? Marriage characteristics of deaf people in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Belgium: a comparative and cross-regional approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2016

SOFIE DE VEIRMAN ,
HELENA HAAGE  and
LOTTA VIKSTRÖM
SOFIE DE VEIRMAN*
Affiliation:
History Department, Ghent University.
HELENA HAAGE
Affiliation:
Department of Historical, Religious and Philosophical Studies, Umeå University.
LOTTA VIKSTRÖM
Affiliation:
Department of Historical, Religious and Philosophical Studies, Umeå University.
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In this article, the marriage characteristics of deaf men and women born in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Belgium are compared to each other, as well as to a group of non-deaf siblings and a group of Swedish deaf persons. The aim is to determine the extent to which the marriage pattern of deaf persons lined up with that of non-disabled persons and to see how experiences of disablement interacted with the environment in which persons dwelt. This article challenges the belief in a universal disability experience by arguing that although deaf individuals generally encountered more difficulties in finding a marriage partner, marriage chances were significantly dependent on personal characteristics such as gender, living environment and birth date. As such, we demonstrate that the relationship between being deaf and being vulnerable on the marriage market was not an inescapable one, but the product of specific environments.

Sourd et non désiré? caractéristiques au mariage des personnes sourdes en belgique aux xviiie et xixe siècles: une approche comparative et interrégionale

Les éléments caractéristiques, à leur mariage, des femmes et des hommes sourds, nés en Belgique aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, sont comparés les uns aux autres, ainsi qu’avec un groupe de frères et sœurs non-sourds et avec un groupe de sourds et sourdes suédois. L’objectif de cet article est de déterminer dans quelle mesure le modèle de mariage des personnes sourdes s’alignait sur celui des personnes non handicapées et de voir comment l’expérience de leur invalidité a pu interagir sur l’environnement dans lequel elles habitaient. Nous remettons ici en question la croyance en quelque universalité dans l’expérience d’invalidité, faisant valoir que même si les personnes sourdes rencontraient généralement plus de difficultés que les valides à trouver un conjoint, leurs chances de trouver un partenaire dépendaient de façon significative de leurs caractéristiques personnelles telles que sexe, milieu de vie et date de naissance. En tant que tel, nous démontrons que la relation entre surdité et personne vulnérable sur le marché matrimonial n’était en rien incontournable, mais était en fait produite par des environnements bien spécifiques.

Stumm und ungewollt? heiratsmerkmale tauber menschen im belgien des 18. und 19. jahrhunderts: ein vergleichender und interregionaler ansatz

In diesem Beitrag werden die Heiratsmerkmale von tauben Männern und Frauen, die im Belgien des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts geboren wurden, einerseits miteinander und andererseits mit einer Gruppe nicht-tauber Geschwister sowie einer Gruppe tauber Menschen in Schweden verglichen. Ziel ist es zu bestimmen, in welchem Umfang die Heiratsmuster tauber Menschen denen nicht-tauber Menschen entsprachen, und herauszufinden, wie die Erfahrungen der Behinderung mit der Umgebung zusammenhingen, in der die Menschen wohnten. Der Beitrag bezweifelt die Vorstellung einer allumfassenden Behinderungserfahrung und behauptet stattdessen, dass trotz der größeren Schwierigkeiten tauber Menschen, einen Heiratspartner zu finden, ihre Heiratschancen entscheidend von anderen persönlichen Merkmalen wie z.B. Geschlecht, Lebensumständen und Geburtsdatum abhingen. In diesem Sinne lässt sich zeigen, dass die Verknüpfung zwischen dem Taubsein und der Verwundbarkeit auf dem Heiratsmarkt nicht unausweichlich, sondern das Ergebnis besonderer Umweltbedingungen war.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , August 2016 , pp. 241 - 273
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

ENDNOTES

1 A selection of publications include: J. Hajnal, ‘European marriage patterns in perspective’, in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley eds., Population in history: essays in historical demography (London, 1965); P. Laslett, Family life and illicit love in earlier generations (Cambridge 1977); I. Devos and L. Kennedy eds., Marriage and rural economy: Western Europe since 1400 (Turnhout, 1999); M. H. D. van Leeuwen, I. Maas and A. Miles, eds., Marriage choices and class boundaries: social endogamy in history (Cambridge, 2005).

2 M. Fine and A. Asch, ‘Beyond pedestals: revisiting the lives of women with disabilities’, in M. Fine ed., Disruptive voices: the possibilities of feminist research (Ann Arbor, 1992), 151.

3 Franklin, P. A., ‘Impact of disability on the family structure’, Social Security Bulletin 40, 5 (1977), 3–18Google Scholar.

4 L. Schur, D. Kruse and P. D. Blanck, People with disabilities: sidelined or mainstreamed? (New York, 2013).

5 S. Sainsbury, Deaf worlds: a study of integration, segregation and disability (London, 1986).

6 Important exceptions include Cockayne, E., ‘Experiences of the deaf in early modern England’, The Historical Journal 46, 3 (2003), 493–510Google Scholar; H. Joyner, From pity to pride: growing up deaf in the Old South (Washington, 2004); and Tellings, A. and Tijsseling, C., ‘An unhappy and utterly pitiable creature? Life and self-images of deaf people in the Netherlands at the time of the founding fathers of deaf education’, Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 10, 2 (2005), 193–202Google Scholar. A common feature of many of the writings, however, is their limited range. In some cases, articles tell the story of one deaf person. Others have access to information that is limited to a specific group within the deaf population, including restrictions with regard to gender, age and social class. Specifically in relation to the study of marriage characteristics, we can mention the study of I. Olsson, Att leva som lytt: handikappades levnadsvillkor i 1800-talets Linköping (Life as a cripple: the living conditions of the handicapped in nineteenth-century Linköping) (Linköping, 1999). For Belgium, no comparable studies exist.

7 Kudlick, C., ‘Disability history: why we need another “other”’, The American Historical Review 108, 3 (2003), 763–93CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; J. Branson and D. Miller, Damned for their difference: the cultural construction of deaf people as disabled: a sociological history (Washington, 2002).

8 See, for example, L. Umansky and P. K. Longmore, ‘Introduction: disability history: from the margins to the mainstream’, in L. Umansky and P. K. Longmore eds., The new disability history: American perspectives (New York, 2001); P. Verstraete, ‘Disability history: a Foucauldian perspective’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leuven, 2008), 42; and Gleeson, B., ‘Disability studies: a historical materialist view’, Disability and Society 12, 2 (1997), 196Google Scholar.

9 See, for example, P. Deprez and C. Vandenbroeke, ‘Population growth and distribution, and urbanization in Belgium during the demographic transition’, in R. Lawton and R. Lee eds., Urban population development in Western Europe from the late-eighteenth to the early-twentieth century (Liverpool, 1989), 220–57.

10 M. H. D. van Leeuwen, I. Maas and A. Miles, eds., Marriage choices and class boundaries: social endogamy in history (Cambridge, 2005).

11 L. Vikström, ‘Gendered routes and courses: the socio-spatial mobility of migrants in nineteenth-century Sundsvall, Sweden’ (unpublished Phd thesis, Umeå University, 2003), 69.

12 Branson and Miller, Damned for their difference, 59.

13 P. C. Higgins, Outsiders in a hearing world: a sociology of deafness (Beverly Hills, 1980), 23–4.

14 Branson and Miller, Damned for their difference, 25.

15 P. C. Higgins, Outsiders in a hearing world, 25–6.

16 Following James Woodward, who in 1972 suggested writing ‘Deaf’ with a capital D to mark Deaf people as a cultural group, the Deaf community has embraced the term as a means to deny the label of ‘disabled’. ‘Deaf’ refers to ‘a member of a linguistic and cultural minority with distinctive mores, attitudes and values and a distinctive physical constitution’. For an introduction to this debate, we refer to: Lane, H. L., ‘Do deaf people have a disability?’, Sign Language Studies 2, 4 (2002), 356–79Google Scholar; B. J. Bruggemann, Deaf subjects: identities and places (New York, 2009); and S. Foster, ‘Examining the fit between deafness and disability’, in P. Devlieger, F. Rusch and D. Pfeiffer eds., Rethinking disability: the emergence of new definitions, concepts and communities (Antwerp, 2003), 111–30. Robinson showed that by the late nineteenth century, deaf people wanted to distinguish themselves from people with other disabilities (O. E. Robinson, “‘We are of a different class”: Ableist rhetoric in deaf America, 1880–1920’, in S. Burch and A. Kafer eds., Deaf and disability studies: interdisciplinary perspectives (Washington, 2010), 5–21).

17 S. Burch, Signs of resistance: American Deaf cultural history, 1900 to World War II (New York, 2002), 139.

18 M. A. Winzer, The history of special education: from isolation to integration (Washington, 1993), 282–3.

19 J. Tollebeek, G. Vanpaemel and K. Wils eds., Degeneratie in België, 1860–1940: een geschiedenis van ideeën en praktijken (Leuven, 2003), 107.

20 ‘Mariage de deux sourds-muets’, in L'Echo du Parlement, 25 October 1868.

21 M. Buyens, De dove persoon, zijn gebarentaal en het dovenonderwijs (Antwerp, 2005), 177 and 263.

22 M. A. Winzer, The history of special education, 220.

23 De Veirman, S., ‘Deaf and disabled? (Un)employment of deaf people in Belgium: a comparison of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century cohorts’, Disability & Society 30, 3 (2015), 460–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 National Archive, Beveren, Conscription registers East Flanders, 1–37, 504–43, 554–63, 582–99, 607–15, 625–33, 643–51, 662–71, 681–91; National Archive, Beveren, Belgian period (1851–1870), 2336; Archive of the Sisters of Love of Jesus and Maria, Gent, Entry list of the ‘Institut des sourdes-muettes’; National Archive, Beveren, Hollands Fonds, 725/19.

25 Nineteenth-century East Flanders had on average 344 deaf individuals in its population (calculations by S. De Veirman, ‘Breaking the silence: the experiences of deaf people in East Flanders, 1750–1950: a life course approach’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Ghent University, 2015), 117–18). Based on the 1858 statistics on the deaf population (Ministère de l'Intérieur, Statistique générale de la Belgique: exposé de la situation du Royaume (période décennale de 1851–1860) (Brussels, 1864)) we calculated that the research individuals (those living in East Flanders in 1858) represented respectively 45.8 and 60.3 per cent of the total male and female deaf population living in East Flanders during that year. These percentages indicate the substantial size of the research population compared to the total East-Flemish deaf population.

26 To be certain that siblings were not deaf (or otherwise disabled) themselves, we checked their names in the sources that were used for identifying the deaf research individuals.

27 For more on the DDB and Sundsvall region: see G. Alm Stenflo, Demographic description of the Skellefteå and Sundsvall regions during the 19th century (Umeå, 1994). For the Sundsvall region, we have no indication of the average number of deaf individuals in its nineteenth-century population, and thus of the share our 46 research individuals represent.

28 The majority of the Swedish deaf individuals were registered ‘deaf’ at a young age (around the age of 15). This suggests that ministers usually ‘discovered’ (and registered) disabilities as their parishioners were of an age to pass confirmation and enter into the labour market.

29 Four hundred and ninety-seven individuals are followed until death, which occurred at an average age of 59 years. Ninety-two individuals leave the analysis in an untimely manner due to migration outside the province, at an average age of 37 years.

30 Age at marriage and marriage homogamy between the spouses are analysed only for first marriages.

31 The marriage characteristics of people with disabilities in the Sundsvall region are discussed in more detail in H. Haage, L. Vikström and E. Häggström Lundevaller, ‘Disabled and unmarried? Marital chances among disabled people in nineteenth-century northern Sweden’, Essays in Economic and Business History (forthcoming special issue, 2017).

32 The SOCPO classification scheme is an alternative to the HISCO scheme. Both schemes provide a way of classifying historical occupations in socio-economic groups, enabling assignment of comparable occupations in different regions and languages to the same classes, and therefore international social class comparisons. SOCPO, more than HISCO, is a class scheme based on the concept of ‘social power’. Social power is defined as ‘the potential to influence one's destiny – or “life chances” – through control of (scarce) resources’ (Van de Putte, B. and Miles, A., ‘A social classification scheme for historical occupational data: partner selection and industrialism in Belgium and England, 1800–1918’, Historical Methods 38, 2 (2005), 61–92Google Scholar, here 63). SOCPO differentiates social power along two different dimensions: economic power and cultural power. The power levels of the economic and cultural dimension are merged into a five-level social power scheme. For practical reasons, we have combined classes 2 and 3 (therefore code 23) and classes 4 and 5 (therefore code 45).

33 C. Vandenbroeke, Sociale geschiedenis van het Vlaamse volk (Beveren, 1981), 89.

34 Ekamper, P., Faes, C. and van Poppel, F., ‘“Vrijers die van verre komen, zijn te schromen”: geografische homogamie van huwelijkspartners, 1812–1922’, Mens en Maatschappij 85, 4 (2010), 380–404Google Scholar.

35 For more on migration and endogamy: see Pélissier, J. P., Rébaudo, D., van Leeuwen, M. H. D. and Maas, I., ‘Migration and endogamy according to social class: France, 1803–1986’, International Review of Social History 50 (2005), 219–46Google Scholar.

36 Van de Putte, B., van Poppel, F., Vanassche, S., Sanchez, M., Jidkova, S., Eeckhaut, M., and Matthijs, K., ‘The rise of age homogamy in 19th century Western Europe’, Journal of Marriage and Family 71 (2009), 1234–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Consequently, 6 Belgian deaf men, 2 Belgian deaf women, 24 male siblings, 12 female siblings, 4 Swedish deaf men and 6 Swedish deaf women were excluded from the SES analysis.

38 E. Shorter, The making of the modern family (New York, 1975), 369. See also Van de Putte, B. and Matthijs, K., ‘Romantic love and marriage: a study of age homogamy in 19th century Leuven’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis 31, 3–4 (2001)Google Scholar.

39 A marriage between two (semi-)skilled workers was most common within this category: respectively 64 and 54 per cent of the deaf and sibling marriages. Van de Putte, Oris and Matthijs have shown that chances of marrying out of the lower classes were rare (Van de Putte, B., Oris, M. and Matthijs, K., ‘Marrying out of the lower classes in nineteenth-century Belgium’, Continuity and Change 24, 3 (2009), 421–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

40 Similarly, H. Bras and J. Kok showed that female domestic servants in the nineteenth century more often married outside their place of birth due to their occupational migration (H. Bras and J. Kok ‘“They live in indifference together”: marriage mobility in Zeeland (The Netherlands) 1795–1922’, in van Leeuwen, Maas and Miles eds., Marriage choices and class boundaries, 247–74.

41 See, for example, Oris, M., ‘The age at marriage of migrants during the industrial revolution in the region of Liège’, The History of the Family 5, 4 (2003), 391–413Google Scholar.

42 See, for example, Gallaudet, E., ‘The intermarriage of the deaf, and their education’, Science 16, 408 (1890), 295–9Google Scholar.

43 However, in many municipalities the town clerks found it unnecessary to report impairments. When the impairment of a deaf research individual was not recorded either, it is impossible to make statements about the presence or absence of an impairment in the spouse.

44 Ministère de l'intérieur, Statistique générale de la Belgique.

45 Similarly, Tellings and Tijsseling, based on a set of 73 letters written by ex-pupils of the Dutch Guyot Institute for the Deaf (early nineteenth century) found that all deaf married authors had a partner who was hearing and that communication with them worked well. A. Tellings and C. Tijsseling, ‘An unhappy and utterly pitiable creature?’, 199.

46 K. U. Mayer and N. B. Tuma eds., Event history analysis in life course research (Madison, WI, 1990); Alter, G. C. et al. , ‘Introduction: longitudinal analysis of historical-demographic data’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 42 (2012), 503–17Google Scholar.

47 The risk of hazard ratios not reaching statistical significance is much higher in small population groups. Thus, the non-significance of some results does not necessarily imply that the variables had no effect on the probability of marriage, but suggests that more research is needed. On the other hand, the larger the effect of a variable, the smaller sample size is required to get a significant value. These considerations may account for the low incidence of significant hazard ratios in Table 5, but also stress the importance of the variables that are significant.

48 For more on rural and urban nuptiality, see A. van der Woude, J. de Vries and A. Hayami, Urbanization in history: a process of dynamic interactions (Oxford, 1990).

49 Cockayne, ‘Experiences of the deaf in early modern England’, 493–510.

50 See, for example, M. Oliver, The politics of disablement: a sociological approach (New York, 1990) and D. L. Braddock and S. L. Parish, ‘An institutional history of disability’, in K. D. Seelman, G. L. Albrecht and M. Bury eds., Handbook of disability studies (Beverly Hills, 2001), 11–68.

51 For more on industrialisation in both regions: see N. Bracke, Bronnen voor de industriële geschiedenis: gids voor Oost-Vlaanderen (1750–1945) (Ghent, 2000); R. Porter and M. Teich eds., The Industrial Revolution in national context: Europe and the USA (Cambridge, 1996); and R. H. Steckel and R. Floud, Health and welfare during industrialization (Chicago, 1997).

52 As individuals were between the age of 0 to 25 years at the start of observation, they had not managed to formalise an occupational career, making the father's occupation the most suitable.

53 See n. 27.

54 van Leeuwen, M. H. D and Maas, I., ‘Endogamy and social class in history: an overview’, International Review of Social History 50 (2005), 1–23Google Scholar.

55 See, for example, T. Bengtsson and G. P. Mineau eds., Kinship and demographic behavior in the past (Dordrecht, 2008) and Bras, H., ‘Migratie en huwelijkssluiting van Zeeuwse vrouwen, 1850–1940: broers en zusters: helpers of rivalen?’, Zeeland: Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen 15, 1 (2006), 18–32Google Scholar. As the parental marriage of the research individuals was followed from marriage to dissolution/age 50 of the mother (complete family histories), the birth order of all research individuals could be assessed accurately.

56 Calculations based on the 1858 deaf census indicate that in Belgium in 1858, 1 in 1,167 urban inhabitants was deaf, compared to 1 in 3,150 rural inhabitants. Ministère de l'intérieur, Statistique générale de la Belgique.

57 For more on people with disabilities in Sweden, see Haage, Vikström and Häggström Lundevaller, ‘Disabled and unmarried?’ and I. Olsson, Att leva som lytt. For more on people with disabilities in Belgium, see S. De Veirman, ‘Breaking the silence’.