Deaf people are a strongly endogamic group, which means that they have traditionally married within the limits of their own group. The eugenics ideology, which prevailed in the early 20th century, also affected marriage legislation and the basic rights of deaf people were violated by restricting their right to marry and start a family. Restrictions on the marriage rights were justified by saying that people born deaf were more likely to have deaf children. However, throughout history most deaf children have been born to hearing parents and most children born to deaf couples are hearing.

The heart of the deaf community is formed by families that have deaf people in several generations and sign language and cultural heritage are transferred naturally from one generation to the next. Of course, the community also includes all the other deaf people and their family members.

In June 1863, their former teacher Carl Oscar Malm died suddenly and the Turku school for the deaf needed a new teacher. The school’s head, Carl Henrik Alopaeus, talked Fritz into becoming a deaf educator, and in October 1863 Fritz accepted the challenging role of teacher. Before the move to Turku, they celebrated their wedding.

Fritz and Maria were married in Helsinki on 27 September 1863. The event aroused interest in Helsinki and the wedding was attended by notables, such as Johan Vilhelm Snellman and Elias Lönnrot. The couple had needed permission from the tsar to marry, and the wedding ceremony was officiated by minister Achilles Sirén, who was a brother of Stén Sirén, Malm’s pupil. Fritz would often talk about the ceremony, which lasted for two hours. This was because the ceremony was performed with the manual alphabet.

Click on the links to read Maria Klingenberg’s and Fritz Hirn’s stories

Of Malm’s students, at least ten married another deaf person after leaving school. Information on the early marriages between deaf people can occasionally be found in old newspapers. In 1879, the Borgå Bladet newspaper listed six marriages between deaf couples. In addition, nine marriages where a deaf man married a hearing woman were mentioned. Most of these couples were married by minister Alopaeus, head of the Turku school. The writer of the announcement also regarded it as important to explain that most of the couples had hearing children.

The best-known of these couples were the Eklunds. Lorentz Eklund (1846–1892) and Elise Wicklund (1849–1915) married on 12 July 1873. Similarly to the Hirns, they needed the tsar’s permission to marry. Lorentz forged a long career as a teacher at Pietarsaari’s school for the deaf. Elise worked as a milliner after finishing school. The Eklunds had six hearing children for whom sign language was their mother tongue. The Eklund’s daughter, Elma, described the status of sign language in the family by saying that for them sign language was the actual language and spoken language was only used with the kitchen help.

Deaf families have always played a central role in the deaf community. In families with several generations of deaf people, sign language and deaf culture and traditions are passed from one generation to the next in a natural manner. These families form the backbone of the deaf community and their sitting rooms have served as places for soirees, socialising and meeting each other. In addition to the Hirns and Eklunds, other influential families in the deaf community at the time included the Stadiuses, the Savisaaris, the Ritalas and the Talvias. Today, well-known families within the community include the Hanhikoskis, the Tarvonens and the Sandholms.

Click on the links to read about the family histories of the Stadiuses, the Savisaaris, the Ritalas and the Talvias

Today, there is no longer a huge chasm between the deaf and the hearing, and the way people select a spouse has also changed. Young deaf people consider it important to have more things in common with a spouse than deafness. Technical advances, people having more international contacts and culture becoming more individual have given people more choice in finding a spouse.

Travel and increased mobility have made it easier to meet new people from further afield. The Internet, online communities and smartphones enable people to remain in contact over long distances. The Internet also makes it easier for deaf and hearing people to get to know one another. When choosing a spouse, it no longer matters whether the person is deaf or hearing, Finnish or foreign. Shared interests and a shared language are what matters.

The matter also became a topic of discussion within the deaf community in the 1920s. The deaf Laina Wainola wrote in the Kuuromykkäin Lehti magazine that medical sciences had shown that sensory disabilities and other hereditary conditions were caused by poor lifestyles. According to Wainola, science had proved true the words in the Bible, according to which God would bring the curse of a father’s sins upon even the third and fourth generation of children. Therefore, deafness was both a hereditary property and a punishment by God, which made it the responsibility of deaf people to remain childless to prevent the suffering from being passed on. Wainola was active in the deaf community, and it came as a surprise that she was so strongly in favour of eugenics. At the time, discussion on the topic did not continue in the magazine.

Interest in eugenics intensified as Finnish marriage laws were being reformed. During the preparations for the new marriage law, statements were collected from various experts, including from the medical field. A proposal for the new marriage law was completed in 1924 and it listed a few unconditional reasons to ban a marriage. In addition, it specified a few groups of people who would need a special dispensation from the president to marry. People who were born deaf belonged to this group. Permission to marry could be granted if the woman was past child-bearing age or if one of the spouses could not have children for some other reason. Deaf people who wanted to marry had to present a doctor’s certificate to prove that at least one of them had become deaf after birth.

Deaf people were quick respond to the claims about the hereditary nature of deafness. In 1927, the Kuuromykkäin Lehti magazine conducted a survey of active association members and deaf educators on their experiences of the inheritance of deafness and views on marriage restrictions. On the basis of the responses, it was concluded that because deafness could not be verified at birth, it was impossible to distinguish between congenital and hereditary deafness. A teacher at Turku’s school for the deaf estimated that 15–20% of deaf people had a hereditary condition. In addition, the respondents stressed that the vast majority of deaf people earned a living and were not a financial burden to society.

However, because eugenics had gained a strong foothold, the protests by deaf people had no impact. The proposal was passed into law in 1929 and discussion on the matter in the magazine abated. On the international level, the ban on marriage between people with congenital deafness was rare. The impact of the law became evident in the work of the ministers for the deaf as the number of wedding ceremonies they were asked to officiate decreased.

However, in the final version of the law, which was approved in 1935, no mention was made of deaf people. However, they could request sterilisation themselves if they suspected they might give birth to ‘impaired children’. Pursuant to the interpretation of the law, sterilisation was a requirement for a marriage between deaf people. More than 7,000 women were sterilised in Finland as a result of the act on sterilisation, but as deaf women were not recorded specifically, their number is not known.

In the late 1930s, the Association for the Deaf began to campaign for a change in the law. People were particularly unhappy because there was no way to distinguish between congenital and hereditary deafness; it was impossible to prove when people who wanted to marry had become deaf. The organisation also emphasised that the likelihood of a deaf couple having deaf children was low. The marriage ban also applied to people whose deafness was regarded as congenital but not hereditary. People who wanted to marry had to submit a certificate to the health authorities to verify that neither of them had hereditary deafness. It would have been more relevant to determine whether deafness ran in their families, which could have been done by studying church records or through sufficient record keeping.

Restricting the right of deaf people to marry was a clear violation of their human rights. The situation was very difficult for deaf people who struggled to find a doctor willing to write a certificate on a matter that was so difficult to prove. Often, they had to visit several doctors before receiving the required document. Occasionally, ministers also declined to marry two deaf people. To be able to live with the person they loved, some deaf people had to live together without being married and have children born out of wedlock at a time when it was not accepted by society. According to a report in 1957, 750 deaf couples were married between 1929 and 1957 and only three couples were prevented from marrying on the account of the law.

Some deaf couples succeeded in getting married because of a loophole in the law, for example if a substitute officiating the ceremony instead of the usual minister was not aware of the legal restrictions. Even though no statistics exist on sterilisation of deaf people, some of them have talked about their difficult experiences, terminations they had to undergo, medical procedures carried out to prevent pregnancies and the general attitudes in society.

A study conducted around that time showed that only 4% of the children born to deaf parents were deaf so inherited deafness could no longer be used as a justification for the law. It was only in 1969 that all marriages between deaf people were permitted. According to a survey carried out in 1972, more than half of the over thousand respondents to the study were married.

The majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and they become members of the deaf community at different stages of their lives. Until the 1970s, this usually happened when the child went to school and met other deaf children. At a time when parents did not have access to sufficient information on deafness and sign language, it was common for a deaf child not to have a common language with the parents, and they communicated with self-made signs. Sometimes, parents were not even able to explain to their child what going to school meant. Today, the linguistic and educational decisions hearing parents make with regard to their deaf child have an impact on their child’s identity. Occasionally parents and children build this identity together and in some cases the child builds it later for himself or herself.

Hearing children born to deaf parents have always been part of the sign language community and they have lived between two cultures. From birth, they have been part of the deaf community and it has always been part of their lives. At the same time, they have acted as links to the hearing world. Before interpretation services became available, hearing children served as their parents’ ears and ended up having to interpret matters that they did not understand properly themselves. Such matters may have involved buying a car or negotiating a loan, and the children have had to take responsibility for important matters from a young age.

Being part of the two worlds was not always easy for hearing children. They had to face the negative, belittling and ignorant attitudes of the surrounding society towards their families, which have been hurtful or have aroused anger in them.

For hearing children born to a deaf family, the language used at home may have changed over time, which has impacted how they viewed their identity. The language may have been sign language or spoken language, and in the best case scenario these children grow up bilingual and bicultural. Some of these children have demanded the right to use sign language in society.

Click here to find more information on the Sign Language Act.

Throughout deaf history, many hearing children of deaf parents have been active members of the deaf community. Such children included Julia and Julius Hirn. As a journalist, Julius highlighted various matters related to deaf people and served in elected positions and carried out pioneering work in several projects. Julia focused on charity work. The Eklunds’ daughters, Elma and Thyra, were involved in association activities, as were Julia Stadius and her daughter, Rea. Eino Savisaari was a popular minister for deaf people. His brother, Runo, was a long-serving chairperson of the Association for the Deaf and helped smooth the path for several important projects.

To read the personal histories of Julius Hirn and Elma Eklund, click on the links.

Elma Eklund said that the children in her family learned to sign before they learned to speak. According to Rea Stadius, her family was multilingual and sign language, Finnish, Swedish and the Karelian dialect were used. As she described it, the Association for the Deaf was one big happy family where numerous engagement parties and weddings between deaf people were celebrated.