Women’s History Month: The Deaf Women Who Shaped ASL and the Field

The story of American Sign Language is usually told through a few men’s names. The fuller history runs through generations of Deaf women — students, teachers, and advocates — who carried the language forward.

March is Women’s History Month, and in the Deaf community it is a fitting time to correct a familiar omission. The founding legend of Deaf education in America centers on Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc. But the reason Gallaudet went looking for a way to teach the Deaf at all was a young Deaf girl: Alice Cogswell.

It Started With a Student

In 1814, Gallaudet met nine-year-old Alice Cogswell, his neighbor’s Deaf daughter, and taught her to connect a written word to an object. Her father, Mason Cogswell, then helped raise the funds that sent Gallaudet abroad and ultimately produced the American School for the Deaf in 1817. The entire arc of formal Deaf education in this country traces back to one Deaf child and the question of how she would learn.

Teachers, Performers, and Advocates

Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Deaf women worked as teachers in residential schools — the institutions where ASL was transmitted, refined, and kept alive from one generation to the next. They were dormitory supervisors, classroom aides, and storytellers, and that informal teaching was often where Deaf children first acquired fluent, native signing from Deaf adults.

In the modern era, Deaf women have led at every level: as university faculty, as actors who brought ASL to national stages and screens, and as organizers in the disability rights movement. The 1988 Deaf President Now protest at Gallaudet University — a turning point in Deaf self-determination — was powered in large part by Deaf women students and faculty who refused to accept yet another hearing administrator.

Why It Matters for the Profession Today

The interpreting field itself is overwhelmingly staffed by women, and it sits downstream of this history. Honoring it is not nostalgia. It is a reminder that ASL is a community-owned language, transmitted through relationships and lived culture — not a code to be looked up. Interpreters who understand where the language comes from serve their clients better.

Rose Sign Language Interpreting is proud to work within a tradition built by Deaf women and to serve the full diversity of San Diego’s Deaf community. Contact us to discuss your needs.