Speech specialist Ernest Tompkins was not alone in thinking that he had figured out what caused stuttering. But when Tompkins penned his 1918 Scientific American article, he not only aimed to disprove other theories from his contemporaries, he also wanted to conclude once and for all the very reason why there seemed to be more boys who stuttered into adulthood than there were girls. Tompkins joined a growing number of writers, scholars, and speech therapists interested in what they called speech defects, who argued that girls had “immunity” or had more easily “recovered” from stuttering because of some quality inherent to their sex or gender. According to Tompkins, the most compelling of such gender-based theories was that, because girls were “in the house more” instead of playing “in the streets” like boys, mothers shielded their daughters from the “unjust treatment” that boys faced in a society that ridiculed them for not conforming to “speech conventions.”[1] Such ridicule invariably worsened speech in boys. Implicit in Tompkins’s argument was the idea that the socially constructed turn-of-the-century women’s spheres protected girls from the conditions that enabled stuttering to persist in boys.
Most turn-of-the-century American theories about stuttering argued that there were vastly different experiences between men and women with speech defects. Speech defect was a term specialists like Tompkins used that encompassed many forms of speech disfluency, including stuttering, lisping, or the inability to speak. It was even used at times to describe an immigrant who spoke with a noticeable foreign accent. Speech professionals argued that if left untreated, stuttering would lead to a life of social degradation, moral failure, and poverty. As is obvious to attuned modern observers, discriminatory assumptions, rather than the existence of the stutter itself, are more often a precondition for social marginalization. Indeed, stutterers’ lived experiences offer ample evidence of the ridicule many individuals experienced from classmates and employers. As is clear from medical texts, speech professionals found that being socially ostracized was a symptom of the stutter itself, rather than a consequence of societal values that too readily marked stutterers as social outcasts and therefore justifiably ridiculed.