Alice T. Terry (1878-1950) was an early deaf activist and writer who championed deaf independence and combatted the practice of Oralism in deaf education by promoting the use of sign language. Her contributions to deaf educational institutions such as Gallaudet College in Washington D.C. and activist organizations like the National Association of the Deaf make her an important figure in the history of disability rights. Terry’s childhood in Missouri was marked by sickness and adversity. Her descriptions of her early life in an article in The Silent Worker illustrate the hardships of growing up as a deaf girl in the late nineteenth century rural Midwest. Superstitious and imprecise medical knowledge in her hometown caused practitioners to treat her acute childhood illness by “punching holes in her ears.” She abruptly lost her hearing after she had begun formal schooling at the age of nine and, in the article, relates in detail the traumatizing experience of being unable to hear and respond to her teacher and the other children in the classroom. After her mother’s death, her father sent her to deaf school in Fulton, Missouri, where she was exposed to sign language for the first time and developed the conviction that it is “the one reliable means in the world to drive away the sense of isolation and deafness.” At the time, the standard method of deaf education centered on Oralism, in which deaf children were encouraged to use spoken language and to read lips. Because of variations in levels of hearing and different exposures to verbal language before loss of hearing, this presented many problems which sign language promised to remedy. Terry’s address to the National Association of the Deaf in 1915 summarizes her support of sign language education and displays her belief in the widespread use of sign language as a means to deaf empowerment and independence. She argued for deaf leadership at the nation’s most prominent institutions of deaf education such as Gallaudet College, including positions for teachers in the faculty and on administrative boards. She also emphasizes sign language as a means to personal happiness through communication and solidarity with other deaf people. In order to combat the stigma against deafness and ignorance in regards to the disabled, Terry maintains that “people will come to know us better, and they will like us infinitely better if we can impress upon them that, despite our affliction, we are constantly seeking our own betterment.”