Helen Beebe

Helen Louise Hulick Beebe (27 December 1908 to 18 March 1989) was an American educator and a pioneer of auditory-verbal therapy. Born in Easton, Pennsylvania, she studied at Wellesley College and the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, and taught in deaf schools in Oregon and California. In 1942 she moved to New York, where she studied with the Viennese speech therapist and psychologist Emil Fröschels and learned the unisensory method. That began a twenty-year collaboration, and after his death she went on developing and spreading the technique now known as the auditory-verbal approach. She founded her Easton practice in 1944, later the Helen Beebe Speech and Hearing Center, and directed it for forty years. In 1938 she made headlines when a judge jailed her for contempt for wearing trousers in court, and an appellate court overturned the citation four days later.