The Child's Speech: speech therapy, stammering, and activism in Britain, 1906-2000

This project will produce a cultural and social history of speech therapy in twentieth-century Britain that is ambitious in seeking to account for the entwined relationship of speech therapy to stammering activism, not simply in a relationship of medical professional to patient.

Municipalities employed speech therapists from c.1906 to ‘correct’ what (in contemporary language) were considered ‘defects’ of children’s speech. Early therapists were often female, trained in drama-school elocution and only later became medicalised. Consequently, they were as marginalised as the disabled subjects they sought to ‘treat’.

Conversely, individuals who stammered long pointed towards the uniqueness of their position and voice to militate for improved therapy.

In short, this project allows an ambitious study that cuts across normally polarised voices of ‘medical professional’ and ‘patient experience’ to explore the boundaries of what encompasses ‘the medical’ itself: both as practices (elocution therapeutics and activism) and as theories (what ‘stammering’ meant). ‘The Child’s Speech’ therefore offers a unique case study into the margins of disability studies which can point towards new frameworks for thinking about professionalisation; its relationship to competing, but also harmonising, forms of expertise, patient voice, experience and activism; and wider gender, race, class and disability dynamics within these.