Deaf and disabled? (Un)Employment of deaf people in Belgium: a comparison of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century cohorts

Abstract

In this article, the employment characteristics of pre-industrial and industrial cohorts of deaf men and women are compared with each other, as well as with a cohort of non-disabled siblings. The aim is to determine the extent to which the employment patterns of deaf persons lined up with those of non-disabled people and to see how nineteenth-century industrialization processes influenced their employment opportunities. This article challenges the widely held assumption that the nineteenth century constituted a definitive break by arguing that the professional lives of deaf people were not necessarily better before industrialization. Moreover, I demonstrate that the development of deaf schools in the course of the nineteenth century opened a new range of career opportunities for deaf individuals.

Keywords:

• employment
• industrialization
• deaf history
• life-course analysis

Points of interest

•	It has been suggested that the origins of unequal labour opportunities for disabled people in today’s society can be traced back to nineteenth-century industrialization.
•	Few disability scholars or historians have endeavoured to study the employment opportunities for disabled men and women in the past due to a lack of adequate source materials.
•	This article undertakes an empirical investigation into the employment opportunities for people born deaf in the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century province of East Flanders in what is now Belgium.
•	Based on longitudinal life-course data, this article shows that deafness made people more vulnerable to economic hardship and discrimination both before and during the Industrial Revolution.
•	The development of schools for deaf persons during the industrial period to some extent mitigated their marginalization by improving their position on the job market and affording them a new range of career opportunities.

1. Introduction

Few aspects of the lives of people with a disability have received as much attention as the relationship between disability and employment. In today’s society, as O’Brien (2013, 321) puts it: ‘disability as a status, both in practice and in the official definitions constructed in social policy, is derived in relation to one’s ability to participate in work’. Consequently, studies on employment opportunities for disabled men and women are manifold. A 1996 survey on the primary sources of income among populations within the European Union indicates that 51% of the people with a moderate disability and 74% of those with a severe disability have no direct income. A decade later, little has changed. The international OECD (2010) report emphasizes that disabled persons have low employment rates despite current efforts to improve them. More recently, Schur, Kruse, and Blanck’s (2013) research into the economic inclusion of people with disabilities shows that they have more difficulties in finding and maintaining employment, have lower than average incomes and are thus more likely to live in poverty.

It has been suggested that the roots of this inequality can be traced back to nineteenth-century industrialization, yet few disability scholars have endeavoured to study the employment opportunities for disabled men and women in the past. The development of industrial society has received ample attention from historians. Scholarly interest from the middle of the twentieth century onwards in the impact of ‘modernization’ has positioned ‘ordinary’ men, women and children at the heart of the debate (for example, Goloboy 2008; Humphries 2010; Burnett 2011), but not all sections of society have received equal attention. In part, this has been the result of problems in finding adequate source materials. With few chances to trace disabled individuals through the records, historians have largely refrained from inquiring into the effects of industrialization in this area.

In fact, sociologists and disability activists have produced most of the studies attempting to provide historical perspective on the matter. Indeed, disability activist Vic Finkelstein (1981), political scientist Deborah Stone (1984) and Disability Studies professor Mike Oliver (1990) were the first to argue that our current understanding of ‘disability’ derives from western industrial society. Following their lead, several scholars have posited that nineteenth-century developments brought about the social and economic marginalization of those with a disability (Davis 1995; Barnes 1996; Gleeson 1999). However, most of the studies supporting this position focus on Anglo-Saxon societal structures alone, and the subsequent detachment from historical–empirical considerations has come under fire. Brendan Gleeson (1997, 196) has justly called for ‘empirically-grounded research on the social experience of disabled people in nearly all historical societies’. This investigation into the employment opportunities for deaf people in the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century province of East Flanders, in what is now Belgium (Figure 1), aspires to react to this call by centring on two questions.

Figure 1. East Flanders’ location within Europe.

Source: LOKSTAT, History Department, Ghent University, 2014.

First, to what extent did employment opportunities for deaf men and women differ from those of the non-disabled population? Second, to what extent did nineteenth-century transformations result in inequality for deaf individuals in the labour market? I will begin with a brief historiographical overview and a description of the sources I used to delineate the cohorts under examination. By means of quantitative analysis, I will then show that, contrary to current assumptions in disability literature, the lives of deaf men and women were not necessarily better in the pre-industrial period, and that the development of deaf schools during the industrial period did mitigate their economic marginalization to some extent.

2. Historiographical framework: the nineteenth-century break

The contention that disabled people have consistently been discriminated against throughout western history is central to much of the older literature (Stiker 1982). However, from the 1980s onward, scholars began to see that ‘while the presence of [disabled] individuals is a constant, culturally shared responses to them vary greatly across time and social context’ (Scheer and Croce 1988, 23), thus undermining this ‘traditional disability history’. Researchers increasingly began to emphasize the importance of historical and social contexts, as ‘for most people with most kinds of disabilities, most of the time the greatest limitations are not somatic but social’ (Longmore 2003, 2). Within this ‘new disability history’, scholars have identified the nineteenth century as the period in which attitudes towards disabled persons and their circumstances underwent important changes.

According to Finkelstein (1981), living conditions were indeed harsh for people with disabilities in the pre-industrial Early Modern Period, but in a context where life was harsh for the majority of the people, their circumstances were not significantly worse. However, when industrialization began to take hold at the start of the nineteenth century, disabled people were excluded from the job market on the grounds that they were unable to keep pace with the new factory system. Also among the growing unemployed, a legal distinction was made between those who were physically impaired and those who were not. The latter were undeserving of aid, while the former were seen as the rightful recipients of charity. Thus while the physically impaired were seen as socially active and accountable for their actions during the Early Modern Period, they came to be viewed as passive and unaccountable in the nineteenth century, and were set apart in a definitive, segregative process.

Deborah Stone developed this hypothesis further in The Disabled State, in which she specified that a ‘distributive dilemma’ was central to the formulation of disability: ‘All societies have at least two distributive systems, one based on work and one on need’, which must be reconciled ‘without undermining the productive side of the economy’ (1984). Stone focused on the role of the state in (re-)defining the boundaries of dependency by setting up categories that expressed ‘a culturally legitimate rationale for non-participation in the labour system’ (1984). But because disability was diverse, subject to change and prone to abuse by malingerers who feigned illness or impairment to obtain assistance, medical professionals, whose scientific status was in the ascendant, were called upon to provide verification (Borsay 1998). This is referred to as the ‘medicalization process’, and its breakthrough is situated around the middle of the nineteenth century (Velle 1986). In addition, Oliver (1990) argues that the period also witnessed the development of an ‘ideology of the individual’, which detached people from their families and the group structures that had previously characterized society. As labour became a commodity, the impaired were stigmatized or even discarded because they threatened to expose the flaws in ‘a system that celebrated the values of independence and utility while providing little or no place for those who had legitimate reasons for not fitting in’ (Kudlick 2008, 212). The transition to capitalism led to the social valorization of paid labour, and those unable to meet society’s expectations in this area found themselves at a severe disadvantage (Gleeson 1999).

3. Research group and sources

This research aims to broaden our understanding of the impact that disability had on employment opportunities by focusing on deaf persons, a group that has received a great deal of attention in the literature. As Branson and Miller (2002, 59) put it: ‘deaf people have been and continue to be the focus of intensive academic, educational, and medical attention and debate’. Indeed, schools for the deaf were established throughout Europe by the end of the eighteenth century, and the first major publications concerning deafness appeared in print at the same time (Davis 1995). From the 1830s onward, national censuses collected information on the size of the deaf population in Belgium and their level of education. This interest among contemporary researchers, as well as the medical, governmental, and religious authorities of the past, probably derives from historical ambivalence regarding both the intelligence and humanity of deaf people.

Higgins (1980) traces this to the debate in Antiquity on what it meant to be human. Early Greek philosophers posited that thinking cannot develop without language; language cannot develop without speech; speech cannot develop without hearing; and therefore those who cannot hear cannot think. Branson and Miller (2002) also describe how the belief that the power of speech ultimately set mankind apart from the animals played a vital part in the marginalization of deaf people. Those without speech were frequently considered less than human, even ‘mindless’, hence the frequently used expression ‘deaf and dumb’. However, these assumptions gradually began to give way, and small-scale initiatives to educate deaf persons arose throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. Deaf people began to be viewed as helpless unfortunates, perhaps not entirely incapable of thought, but lamentable nonetheless (Higgins 1980).

The decision to use a deaf population to test whether the lives of disabled people deteriorated in the nineteenth century is not meant to imply that all disabilities were equivalent. Deaf people had to overcome different barriers to those faced by people with other types of impairments. Moreover, this research does not aspire to provide a comprehensive history of the deaf; rather, it is merely an attempt to show how a hearing impairment could shape people’s lives in different ways, dependent upon the context in which they lived.

3.1. Identifying deaf persons in historical sources

Disability historians usually rely on documents from institutions for disabled persons, who generally had neither the means nor opportunity to document their own lives. Although of great value, these sources have three major drawbacks. Firstly, they are written from the ‘top-down’, outsider’s perspective of professionals and philanthropists. Secondly, they rarely contain personal details. Lastly, they only pertain to the institution’s residents, and are thus not representative of the disabled population in general. The latter two issues are of particular concern here because quantitative analysis not only depends upon sufficient data, but requires the delineation of subject pools that are both consistent and comparable. Nor are the most commonly employed sources in population studies – birth, marriage and death records – entirely up to the task; while often available as early as the sixteenth century, they do not include information on impairments. Fortunately, the province of East Flanders possesses four unique sources that not only identify deaf people from 1748 onwards, but which contain sufficient information to allow for cross-referencing with more general records:

(1)	Conscription as a means of systematic military recruitment was introduced in Flanders in 1796. Sufficient ‘conscrits’ (conscripts) to meet the army’s quota were drawn from an annual lottery of all males 20 years of age. A medical examination of all entrants was performed, and men suffering from a range of acknowledged conditions, including deafness, were permanently exempted from military service and the grounds for their dispensation registered (Beveren, State Archives Belgium).
(2)	From the 1830s onward, Belgium’s central government conducted regular censuses to assess the size of both the deaf and blind populations. In East Flanders, the census of 1858 was supplemented by richly detailed reports pertaining to 50 deaf individuals living there at the time (Commission Centrale de Statistique).
(3)	In 1820, the first Belgian school for deaf girls, the ‘Institut des sourdes-muettes’– was established in Ghent by Father Jozef Triest. From the very start, its administration kept a detailed matriculation list of the pupils, who hailed from all levels of society (Ghent, Archive of the Sisters of Love of Jesus and Mary).
(4)	In 1821, a roll entitled ‘The state of all deaf-mutes living in East Flanders’ was drawn up, probably at the request of the provincial government. However, neither the initiator nor its motives are recorded. It names around 200 deaf persons, and includes information about their age, residence and ‘state of being’ – whether he or she was an orphan, attended a deaf school, had other family members with an impairment, was indigent, and so forth (Beveren, State Archives Belgium).

Men and women listed in these sources were included in the subject pool if they met the following three criteria. Firstly, their date and place of birth had to be known, which would allow for their identification in civil records. Secondly, their date of birth had to fall either before 1810 or between 1830 and 1860, in order to delineate two separate cohorts for the sake of comparison: one ‘pre-industrial’ and one ‘industrial’. Lastly, subjects’ deafness had to be congenital or date from early childhood – as indicated by a lack of speech (‘deaf and dumb’) – so the hearing impairment affected their life courses from the start. Based on the above sources and criteria, a potential research group of 300 deaf men and women from the Belgian province of East Flanders born between 1748 and 1860 was compiled. Each subject was then paired with a sibling of the same sex and the closest in age in order to form a balanced and representative control group of individuals raised under similar circumstances. In cases where only one child was born or had survived, the sibling of another deaf subject of similar age, living in the same or a similar municipality, was selected.

4. Employment opportunities for deaf individuals: case study of two cohorts

4.1. Studying employment in the past: sources and their limitations

After the delineation of two deaf cohorts and two sibling control groups, occupational information was recovered from civil records and population registers. Civil records for Belgium are available from 1796 onwards and consist of birth, marriage and death registers. The birth registers contain information about the occupation of the father, who was responsible for declaring the birth of a child before the local authorities; the mother’s occupation is obtainable only when she reported an illegitimate birth. Marriage registers are particularly handy sources for finding employment information given that they provided the occupations of both partners, as well as their parents. However, only about 10% of the deaf individuals in the subject pool married or had children, so their usefulness was limited in this instance. And while almost all individuals were found in the death registers, those who were retired are simply listed as ‘without occupation’, regardless of whatever line of work they may have been engaged in previously.

The other sources consulted also proved less than ideal at times. Population registers became mandatory in all Belgian municipalities every decade from 1846 onwards, and comprise a list of all households. In theory, they record the occupation of every resident adult – in practice, municipal officials often took down only the household head’s occupation. Furthermore, both civil and population registers tended to overlook female employment, which did have an impact on the analysis by artificially lowering the number of working women. These limitations were partially mitigated by the sources used to identify deaf individuals, which sometimes included occupational information. Conscription lists and the individual reports made to supplement the censuses taken of the deaf population always give the current occupation of the person in question, while ‘The state of all the deaf-mutes living in East Flanders’ occasionally contained the same data.

4.2. Economic development in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century East Flanders: an overview

The province of East Flanders, apart from the availability of unique source material, is an excellent focus for this study because of its shift from an inclusive economic system of cottage industry to an exclusive industrial economy over the course of the nineteenth century. Early Modern Flanders was characterized by what economic historian F. Mendels (1969) called a ‘proto-industrial’ or ‘pre-industrial’ economic system. Economic historians S. Ogilvie and M. Cerman, in their survey of European proto-industrialization, define it as ‘the expansion of domestic industries producing goods for non-local markets which took place in many parts of Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (1996, 1). The textile industry played the most significant role in Flanders’ proto-industrialization, just as it did elsewhere. Indeed, according to historian C. Vandenbroeke (1987), employment levels in domestic industry in Flanders were the highest in Early Modern Europe, to the extent that by the end of the eighteenth century almost one-half of the population was engaged in the rural linen industry as spinners and weavers. In contrast to countries such as England where full-time wage labourers were common, the majority of the Flemish still owned some land. This indicates that people used agriculture as their primary source of income, supplemented by rural industry: small-scale farmers, with an extra income from the textile sector, made up 70–75% of the economically active population in East Flanders at the end of the eighteenth century (Vandenbroeke 1979). Given that all of this economic activity was mainly situated at home, disabled individuals could easily contribute to the household income.

However, this situation changed in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the textile sector became increasingly mechanized and centralized. The proto-industrial system, unable to compete, fell into decay, and in turn this resulted in higher rates of poverty, as reflected by the references to ‘poor Flanders’ in many sources (Vandenbroeke 1987). While the impact of the industrial revolution on rural Flanders peaked towards the end of the nineteenth century, the changes in the labour market were felt much sooner. Cheap, unskilled labour increasingly replaced the proto-industrial workers, resulting in a growing wage-earning working class. The percentages of people working in manufacturing industries, or ‘secondary’ sector, and the service sector, or ‘tertiary’ sector, steadily rose. Occupational mobility also increased as travelling over longer distances became easier and more people commuted, mostly to the cities (Vanhaute 2003). As economic activities relocated outside the household, the employment of disabled people no longer fell in the family sphere, but rather in the more competitive labour market.

4.3. Employment characteristics of deaf people: results

Offering a comprehensive overview of all the employment opportunities for deaf persons is beyond the scope of this article. Rather, this study aims to empirically test the hypothesis put forward by Finkelstein and others that nineteenth-century transformations eroded employment opportunities for disabled people. The analysis’s focus is therefore on the differences in employment between individuals with and without disability, and on the evolution of employment characteristics in the nineteenth century. The employment pattern among deaf individuals born between 1748 and 1810 – the pre-industrial cohort – is expected to line up with the employment pattern found among their non-disabled siblings, while the findings for deaf persons born between 1830 and 1860 – the industrial cohort – should show a growing discrepancy with those of their non-impaired siblings, thus indicating a general deterioration in employment opportunities for deaf individuals.

The potential subject pool of 300 deaf and 300 non-disabled individuals was narrowed down to 273 and 275 persons respectively. This was accomplished by discarding the 27 deaf and 25 non-disabled siblings without any listed occupation. Those that were explicitly recorded as being ‘without occupation’ were counted in a separate category. Because employment opportunities were no doubt affected by both environment and gender, distinctions were made based on these variables; the latter on the assumption that women faced more difficulties in the labour market than men. I distinguished between individuals born in rural or urban municipalities on the grounds that while a smaller community probably meant lower levels of isolation for disabled persons, they were not likely to offer the same range of employment or educational opportunities found in larger communities (Cockayne 2003).

4.3.1. Unemployment as an indicator of economic discrimination

The issue of unemployment and the differences between deaf and non-disabled individuals, as well as their evolution, is central to this analysis. Figure 2 represents the number of individuals recorded as ‘without occupation’ according to environment, gender and birth cohort. In order to avoid the artificial inflation in the figures that would result from the inclusion of those who were retired in the dataset, only individuals recorded as ‘without occupation’ between the ages of 15 and 65 are included – the theoretically economically active population, in other words.

Figure 2. Unemployment (%) according to cohort, period, environment and gender (15–65 years).

Source: MS Access Database of author, compiled from civil and population registration.

A comparison of the deaf and sibling cohorts immediately shows that the deaf cohort had uniformly higher rates of unemployment. While unemployment generally increased in the course of the nineteenth century, as demonstrated by the figures for the industrial sibling control group, the much higher percentage of unemployed deaf individuals is striking – and an initial indication of economic discrimination. We must bear in mind that being registered as ‘without occupation’ does not necessarily imply that deaf individuals were economically inactive. It is entirely possible that they contributed to the household by performing unremunerated work, or that their occupation had been overlooked by the authorities – who were perhaps focused on the head of the household rather than any ‘dependents’ (Devos, De Langhe, and Matthys 2014).

Regardless of cohort or environment, deaf women were particularly susceptible to unemployment. Moreover, the low marriage rate among this group – just 8% – means that the majority did not rely on financial support from a spouse. Perhaps the disparity is related to a gender bias, in which even deaf men were expected to support themselves, while it was more accepted for their female counterparts to live at home, either simply residing with or taking care of relatives. Yet higher rates of female unemployment in general probably played a role as well, as demonstrated by the figures for the sibling control group.

In fact, unemployment rates rose for both deaf people and their siblings across the province over the course of the nineteenth century. Deaf individuals residing in an urban area witnessed a 17% increase in unemployment, as opposed to 13% in rural areas. Among their siblings, the unemployment increase was much less pronounced: just 6% and 10% respectively. This general increase in unemployment is consistent with the gradual demise of the proto-industrial economy. However, the greater increase found among the deaf population indicates that a disability made people more vulnerable during periods of economic hardship. At the same time, it must be said that unemployment was highest for both cohorts in the cities, which suggests that the urban environment was less economically favourable for individuals with a disability. A possible explanation is that those in rural regions could work in the agricultural sector, which required fewer skills than the crafts more commonly found in the cities.

Differences in unemployment between the deaf and hearing cohorts become even clearer when looking at the mean and median age when they were listed as being ‘without occupation’ (Table 1). In line with the findings based on Figure 2, the mean and median ages are lower for the deaf population. Thus it appears that deaf individuals were not only unemployed more often, but also at an increasingly earlier age – well below the average age of retirement. Even so, the mean and median ages were higher for deaf women in the industrial cohort than for their siblings or deaf men. The greater number of educated deaf women in the dataset could explain the gender difference, as they may have had a better chance of employment. In addition, the difference between the deaf women and their siblings might be explained by their sisters being more likely to marry and have children, giving them less time and fewer reasons to work outside the home.

Table 1. Mean and median age (years) at unemployment, according to cohort, period and gender.^a

	Pre-industrial cohort				Industrial cohort
	Men		Women		Men		Women
	Mean	Median	Mean	Median	Mean	Median	Mean	Median
Deaf	45.7	44.6	40.7	36.8	33.4	24.1	39.7	39
Siblings	62.5	62.5	49.8	52.7	43.6	60.1	34.4	32.3

^a From individuals recorded ‘without occupation’ multiple times, the youngest age is taken into consideration.

Source: MS Access Database of author.

4.3.2. Employment characteristics of the economically active deaf population

Economic discrimination is not only reflected by the higher rate of unemployment, but also in the extent to which deaf individuals were employed in different sectors. Tables 2 and 3 show the listed occupations for the economically active population between the ages of 15 and 65, according to gender and environment, for the pre-industrial and industrial cohorts and their sibling control groups, respectively. The occupations are divided into 12 categories, largely according to the classification scheme devised by Jaspers and Stevens (1985). ‘Undetermined’ denotes those individuals listed somewhat vaguely as ‘contributing to their maintenance through labour’ in ‘The state of all deaf-mutes living in East Flanders’. It should be borne in mind that the number of jobs held does not equate to the number of individuals involved. Tables 2 and 3 are based upon 346 job listings for deaf individuals, 61 of whom had two or more occupations, and 469 listings for their siblings, 97 of whom had two or more occupations. There are two explanations for this apparent discrepancy. A person may have combined two different jobs – for example, alternating agricultural work with textile production according to season – or they may simply have changed profession at some point. Future analysis of this subset of individuals could provide new insights into career development among deaf people.

Table 2. Pre-industrial occupation (%) by sector, gender and environment (15–65 years of age).

	Deaf cohort				Sibling control group
	Urban		Rural		Urban		Rural
	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female
Agriculture	8	0	30	25	11	5	35	29
Unskilled labour	24	30	34	15	23	16	34	22
Crafts	48	60	21	49	46	37	20	43
Textile production	8	30	12	42	17	10	12	40
Construction	0	0	1	0	6	0	0	0
Food preparation	4	0	4	0	3	0	5	0
Garment trade	16	30	4	7	6	26	3	3
Other	20	0	0	0	14	0	0	0
Trade and transport	0	10	2	2	14	21	3	3
Service sector	0	0	1	0	6	5	3	0
Domestic service	8	0	3	2	0	16	4	2
Undetermined	12	0	9	7	0	0	1	1
Total %	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100
Number	25	10	112	59	35	19	102	69

Source: MS Access Database of author.

Table 3. Industrial occupation (%) by sector, gender and environment (15–65 years of age).

	Deaf cohort				Sibling control group
	Urban		Rural		Urban		Rural
	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female	Male	Female
Agriculture	3	0	21	6	2	0	14	23
Unskilled labour	24	0	21	6	19	34	44	22
Crafts	65	82	41	77	59	41	16	28
Textile production	10	27	6	27	15	22	8	20
Construction	7	0	0	0	17	0	2	0
Food preparation	0	0	2	0	6	3	5	2
Garment trade	24	55	31	48	4	16	0	6
Other	24	0	2	2	17	0	1	0
Trade and transport	4	0	2	0	13	13	13	15
Service sector	0	9	0	0	8	0	5	2
Domestic service	4	9	13	8	0	12	8	9
Undetermined	0	0	2	2	0	0	0	1
Total %	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100
Number	29	11	52	48	53	32	94	65

Source: MS Access Database of author.

As may be expected, during the pre-industrial period agricultural employment predominated among the males, whether deaf or hearing (at 30% and 35% respectively), while unskilled labour accounted for a further 34% in both groups. However, the high rate of unskilled labour, which consisted of day labourers and workers irregularly employed in a wide variety of tasks, is atypical for the time and place. Prior to the first half of the nineteenth century, full-time wage labourers were uncommon in Flanders because the majority of households owned and worked a piece of land for themselves. The high number of unskilled deaf labourers may indicate that deaf men were less likely to own land and were thus more likely to be consigned to the uncertainty of day-labour. Among the female deaf cohort and sibling control group, the majority were employed in the textile sector (42% and 40% respectively) and within agriculture (at 25% and 29% respectively), which is consistent with the employment profile for females in the region at the end of the Early Modern period (De Langhe 2012).

In the cities, the majority of the deaf men and their brothers worked as craftsman (48% and 46% respectively) or as unskilled labourers (24% and 23% respectively). Minor differences become noticeable when looking at the different types of crafts. Deaf men were not represented in construction as masons, roofers or carpenters – comparatively dangerous trades where hearing was a definite advantage and in which 6% of their siblings took part. In addition, more siblings – 17% as opposed to 8% of the male deaf cohort – took part in textile production. Deaf men, on the other hand, were much more likely to work in the garment trade as tailors or shoemakers, or in the ‘other’ category as engravers or gilders. Most of the non-disabled brothers employed within ‘other’ crafts were listed as mechanics, painters or manufacturers. Deaf females and their sisters were mainly employed in textile production as spinsters or in the garment trade as seamstresses. The next most common occupations were unskilled labour among the female deaf cohort (30%), and trade and transport among their siblings (21%).

Among both males and females, deafness appears to have been more of an obstacle to employment within the service sector (teachers, police officers and clerks), trade and transport (shopkeepers, innkeepers and merchants) and in domestic service (servants or maidservants). Male and female siblings were employed more frequently in the service sector and in trade and transport – perhaps because the ability to communicate effectively was an important prerequisite in both areas. Interestingly, domestic service employment among the deaf cohort was the exclusive domain of males, even though it was a typical occupation among the female sibling control group. Why exactly remains to be seen. However, as jobs in all three categories were more prevalent in the cities during the pre-industrial period, differences between the deaf cohort and the sibling control group were not as great in the countryside.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the differences in employment characteristics between the deaf cohort and the sibling control group became more clear-cut. The predominance of agriculture and textile manufacturing among both the deaf and hearing population declined as proto-industry declined, while the number of individuals employed in other crafts and the service sector increased. This is in line with general employment trends in the region at the time. Yet there were differences. Against expectations, the number of unskilled labourers who were deaf declined, even as it tended to rise among their siblings – suggesting that the latter’s position in the labour market had weakened, forcing them into unsteady jobs. Meanwhile, the garment trade became the dominant employer of deaf men and women. This rise in the numbers of deaf shoemakers, tailors and seamstresses, on the one hand, and their retreat from unskilled labour, on the other, probably derives from the establishment of schools for deaf persons in East Flanders.

The first such institution dates from 1820 in Ghent, and more schools were opened in the province over the course of the nineteenth century. Their purpose was twofold: to provide pupils with a basic education, and to help them acquire a profession. Girls were mainly trained as dressmakers, seamstresses, milliners or domestic servants; boys were instructed in tailoring or shoemaking, or apprenticed to master craftsmen in the city (Buyens 2005). Deaf individuals who could read and write were not only better adjusted socially, but were better prepared for the job market. Moreover, their vocational training gave them an advantage over their unskilled counterparts, affording them an opportunity to avoid the economic uncertainty of irregular employment as day labourers. Indeed, the absence of such schools prior to 1820 could account for the high numbers of rural, unskilled, deaf labourers in the pre-industrial period – lack of education may have meant that such work was all that was within their reach. Certainly, deaf schools were invariably located in urban areas, as reflected by the higher numbers of deaf individuals working in the garment trade in pre-industrial cities (Table 2). General mobility then increased during the nineteenth century, making it more feasible for those from the countryside to attend schools elsewhere – as indicated by the surge in the numbers of rural deaf individuals employed in that sector. However, education did not guarantee employment, as is clear from the nineteenth-century rise in unemployment among deaf individuals (Figure 2).

The garment trade was not as popular among the control group. Rural male siblings increasingly earned a living as unskilled labourers (+10%), as servants (+4%) or within trade and transport (+10%), while in the city the largest increase was within construction (+11%). More and more urban female siblings also opted to become unskilled labourers (+16%) or textile workers (+11%), while their rural counterparts found employment as shopkeepers or innkeepers (+12%) or servants (+7%). Yet, both in the deaf cohort and the sibling control group, an increasing number of rural men and women were employed as servants or maids – which is not surprising. In the nineteenth century, both land ownership and the likelihood of inheriting land decreased, and greater numbers of people were turning to full-time wage labour. So-called ‘life-cycle service’ arose, in which adolescents and young adults entered service to accumulate money in preparation for starting their own households; once married, they then switched jobs or became housewives. The high median age of deaf servants (43.6 years) suggests that ‘life-cycle service’ was prolonged among deaf individuals, probably because of the difficulties they faced in courting, setting up their own households, and changing occupations. Among the sibling control group, the median age when listed as a servant was just 32.8 years.

5. Conclusions

According to the literature, people with a disability led somewhat ‘ordinary’ lives in terms of their social and economic participation during the Early Modern Period but, as a result of nineteenth-century socio-economic developments, they were increasingly discriminated against and excluded from mainstream society. The trouble involved in identifying disabled individuals in historical sources has made empirical and quantitative studies in this area difficult. The aim of this article was to test this hypothesis by making use of the available occupational data on two cohorts of deaf men and women, and sibling control groups, born in either the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries in East Flanders. Two questions were addressed: to what extent did employment opportunities for deaf men and women differ from those of the non-disabled population; and to what extent did nineteenth-century transformations result in inequality for deaf individuals in the labour market? Cross-referencing sources identifying deaf men and women with civil records and population registers containing occupational information resulted in a subject pool of 273 deaf individuals and 275 able-bodied siblings. The quantitative analysis of this dataset suggests that the above hypothesis requires some adjustment.

While general unemployment increased and the mean age of the jobless decreased in East Flanders over the course of the nineteenth century, the research presented here shows that the deaf population was indeed harder hit. Both the substantial rise in unemployed deaf individuals and the drop in their mean age clearly indicate that deafness certainly made people more vulnerable to economic hardship and discrimination during the Industrial Revolution. Employment became increasingly associated with ideals of respectability and moral uprightness, and thus it became ever harder for deaf persons to establish their identity and place in society. Yet the pre-industrial period was not one of economic prosperity either: joblessness was already high, especially in the cities, and a large number of those fortunate enough to have employment found it in the unskilled labour sector, where wages were low and unreliable. Furthermore, the number of deaf persons undertaking such work decreased during the second half of the nineteenth century – in direct opposition to the general trend. The slack appears to have been taken up by steadier, skilled employment in the domestic service sector and garment trade, and the vocational training provided by the expanding deaf educational system seems the decisive factor. Thus, the assertion that deaf people led relatively ‘ordinary’ lives during the pre-industrial period before succumbing to the pressures of the job market as it evolved during the Industrial Revolution appears unfounded.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FWO Vlaanderen under Grant FWO10/ASP/275.