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From: Anders Lundberg, Göteborg, Sweden
Date: 10/17/01
Time: 8:34:07 AM
Remote Name: 146.21.116.174
Thank you for so much for your article. Like you, I am interested in the gender of stuttering and its problems, really beginning back in 1977 and 1978, when I concluded a project on longitudinality, beginning 1962-63 and first conducted by Fritzell. One thing I found, a possibility of being an artifact as well as a fact, was that all the women (23 of them in a group of 83) mentioned appearance amongst the problem areas of speech, and none of the men did. Oh, I am a man, and that could also be a reason, of course. Hm.
I was then and am now and was all the years in between, being touched by the problem of stuttering in a clinical sense. As a student of Van Riper’s I vividly remember him saying that seeing teen-age girls was his worst, since he never could understand them and when he was in his teens himself as a stuttering young man, he could not understand girls at all; he never saw them. And of course, meeting the teen-age girls has been a severe riddle for me too, bit being a stuttering person with a severe handicap way back and a man. But one of the reasons choosing stuttering as one’s field is, for me at least, the mere existence of stuttering as a riddle and a problem, so I began trying to understand. In most textbooks the gender fact is taken care of in the foreword or chapter one; stuttering boys/men are more common than stuttering girls/women and therefor the clients are labeled “he” and clinicians “she”. And that is, for the most part, what is said about women at all. In my own textbook, in Swedish that is, there is at least a little more! And in the reworking there will be a better developing of that perspective.
As using the above as the background (so you know I have been thinking some at least) I cannot agree with you on the “people” concept in its, what I believe, fullest sense. There is some more element than just “people” in the meaning of seeking help; it is quite obvious groups work together in different ways, groups of women as compared to groups of men for one thing. Naturally, as I see it, there must age related, gender related, developmentally related, professionally related etc filters in which behaviors, problems, perceptions, severity and solving of the problems are sipped through. No man is an island! But averages and standard deviations? No. And quantification of quality, we have learned from Pirsig, is an impossibility!
And the article of yours is digged into by my students as well. Thanks again.
Anders Lundberg, Göteborg, Sweden