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School for the Deaf in 1886, and then Gallaudet. She began coursework in the fall of 1888 as one of only eight women and the youngest student on campus. Gallaudet had no female dormitory accommodations (the women lived at the home of President Edward M. Gallaudet), women could not leave the school without chaperone, and the faculty had ruled that women could not join the extracurricular literary societies because of the “obvious impropriety of association of the young ladies with the young men.” Skepticism remained about women’s presence. Would the women be able to handle the demands of the curriculum? Should women and men attend segregated classes, with separate curriculums, for women’s own safety and benefit? In 1895 some male students, using the language of the sideshows at which they easily could have been attendees, characterized the women “freaks.” Many years later Tiegel wrote, “I resented that there might be any question of the right, the God given right, of my sisters and myself to take our places in the sun.” 23
    As the valedictorian of 1893 Tiegel, the first female to graduate from Gallaudet with a BA, delivered an address entitled “The Intellect of Woman.” On Presentation Day, likely before an audience of congressional as well as university dignitaries, Tiegel proclaimed boldly that “there is no inferiority in [women’s] intellectual capacity, but only neglect of use and tardiness of development.” She argued that “restrictive circumstances” had held women “so far below her powers that we do not apprehend the full evil of these circumstances.” Tiegel drew connections between the racism that undergirded slavery and the sexism that undergirded the lack of educational opportunities for women, for both claimed that deficient bodies rendered women and African Americans unfit for a full civic life. “To argue also,” she went on, “that a woman is not fit to be trusted with her liberty on the score of her emotional nature, her poor powers of logic and judgement, is to copy the fallacies of the opponents of emancipation, who used as arguments those very faults in slaves that slavery had produced.” 24 Tiegel had no African American students in her courses, for they were not permitted to be there. Indeed, Andrew Foster, the first African American to graduate from Gallaudet, did not do so until 1954.
    The creation of Gallaudet reflected the continued expansion of institutions and residential schools for people with disabilities that had begun decades earlier. By the turn of the century, over 130 residential schools served deaf students, 31 served blind students, and approximately 14 schools had been established for those diagnosed as feeble-minded. 25 The majority of adults in institutions, however, still lived in asylums, prisons, and almshouses—a radically different experience than that at the National Deaf-Mute College.
    Life at residential schools for deaf students, and life for deaf people in general, changed dramatically in the years following the Civil War due to the rise of oralism. Oralism is the belief that deaf people can and should communicate without the use of sign language, relying exclusively on lip reading and oral speech. In the early years of deaf education in the United States, teachers taught and used sign language (called manual education). Sign language, they argued, “liberated deaf people from their confinement” and enabled them to receive Christianity. Deaf people became leaders in emerging deaf social communities facilitated by educational institutions. The post–Civil War generation of educational theorists, however, led by Alexander Graham Bell, argued that sign language served as an “instrument of . . . imprisonment.” Sign language, many proclaimed, made deaf people outsiders: “The gesturer is, and always will remain, a foreigner,” never a true American. While European Americans forbade the use of indigenous languages at Native boarding schools,