Alexander Graham Bell has long been a polarizing figure, admired as the brilliant inventor of the telephone and other extraordinary devices, but also despised as the leading exponent of oralism, the movement that pressured deaf people to learn speech and, more important, not to learn sign language. He had a deaf mother and a deaf wife, but he worked relentlessly to normalize their deafness, hoping that they might become such clever facsimiles of hearing people as to be spared the disadvantages of their manifest disability.
In his later life, Bell was loosely associated with eugenics, perhaps the most misguided of all Victorian ideologies. He never advocated for deaf people to be sterilized; in fact, he opposed such practices. But he did try to persuade deaf people not to marry one another, because he feared that they would pass on their disability and create a “defective variety of the race.” He recruited prominent figures to his side, including Helen Keller, who dedicated her first memoir to him, and who initially understood herself the way he understood her: as an inspirational but broken human being. “I can’t imagine a man wanting to marry me,” she said. “I should think it would seem like marrying a statue.”
