Introduction
Identity is a slippery concept. It is usually applied to the person. Someone's identity, or how they see themselves, is said to influence how they think, act, feel and what they believe in. People talk about identities as being positive or negative, static or evolving, in crisis or healthy.
There has been little talk in common parlance or in the professional literature within speech-language pathology, on issues related to professional identity. Such issues can be considered in terms of the profession's sense of itself and how that sense was manifest, now and in the past. I would like to redress this gap in our thinking about professional identity by reflecting first on how speech-language pathology originally carved out its own identity, and then considering how the early choices have affected today's professional practices.
The progressive era1890-1920
We tend to take our profession for granted, assuming it must have always been here, but that is not the case. Our national organization, The American Speech-Language and Hearing Association, didn't exist a mere 80 years ago. It unofficially began in 1925, when a small group of individuals who had been doing research, college teaching, and administration in the field of speech correction met to establish themselves as an independent profession (Duchan, 2002).
That is not to say that there were no professionally identified speech-language-or hearing specialists prior to that time. Indeed, we can trace our ancestors in America back to early 19th century (Duchan, in progress). And later in that century, there were a number of speech therapists practicing in America.
For example, in 1872, Alexander Graham Bell set up his private practice in Boston, Massachusetts for "the correction of defects of utterance".
And there were many others who offered "lessons in speech correction" to those who had speech disorders (See Duchan, in progress for more details).