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

Stammering remains on the margins of disability and disability studies. This project will develop the first history of speech therapy for children who stammered in twentieth-century Britain, explored through the stories of stammering activism and speech therapy which - I argue - are not separate but bound together. Speech therapy as a profession has also historically been marginalised within medicine, mostly on account of gender (its practitioners are overwhelmingly female and have faced discrimination as a consequence) and its historical links to elocution rather than experimental science. Stammering activism has long proceeded alongside the development of therapy - from early twentieth-century therapists who mobilised experiences of being (former) 'stammerers' through to the creation of the British Stammering Association in 1978. In exploring these interconnections, I shall address broader questions around what terms 'experience', 'expertise' and even 'the medical' mean in the context of stammering and its therapy.