For whatever reason, left-handedness was not acceptable to in the 19th century.
A.A.
Left handedness hasn't been accepted throughout history. I found an interesting article that explains some of the origin of this hatred:
Many left-handed people consider themselves oppressed by the right-handed majority — to the point of "prejudice." Many European languages (including English) use the same word for "right" (in a directional sense) to mean "correct, proper". The Latin word for "right-handed" is "dexter," as in dexterity. Throughout history, being left-handed was considered as negative — the Latin "sinister" means "left." In Italian, it is sinistra. There are many negative connotations associated with the word "left-handed": clumsy, awkward, unlucky, insincere, sinister, malicious, and so on. French gauche, meaning "left", means "awkward or clumsy" in English, whereas French droit is cognate with English "adroit", meaning dextrous, skilful with the hands, and right-handed. In Spanish, the word "diestro" (right-handed) means also skilful. As these are all very old words, they would tend to support theories indicating that the predominance of right-handedness is an extremely old phenomenon.
The Eskimos believed that every left-handed person was a sorcerer. In the old age, though there were few examples of it happening, a Japanese man could divorce his wife if he discovered that she was left-handed. There have been, however, many famous left-handed people, and the associated right brain hemisphere that is said to be more active in left-handed people has been found in some circumstances to be associated with genius and is correlated with artistic and visual skill.
Until very recently in Taiwan, left-handed people were strongly encouraged to switch to being right-handed (or at least, switch to writing with the right hand). Latin characters are equally easy to write with either hand, but it is more difficult to write legible Chinese characters with the left hand. The prescribed direction of writing each line of a Chinese character is designed for the movements of the right hand, and some shapes tend to feel awkward to follow with the left hand's fingers. It results in a less soft writing than it would be with the right hand.
Some theorize that those languages that have a written language from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew, are derived from cultures where the first writing was chiselled by hand in stone, where right-handed masons would write from right to left. Under this theory, cultures where the first written words were on some form of paper use left to right. This is not universally accepted, however.
Until the latter part of the twentieth century, Roman Catholic nuns in American elementary schools (and possibly elsewhere, like in Dutch primary schools) would punish children for using their left hand to write, typically by slapping their left hand with a ruler if they attempted to pick up a pen with it. Left-handedness was interpreted as a sign of Satanic influence, and thus prohibited.
It has been hypothesized that some sun worshipers have grown to associate their left sides with evil, since people facing north would see the sun set (disappear) on their left. The evidence for this is very weak, however, as the opposite conclusion can be drawn when one considers a person facing south (the opposite direction). It has been suggested that there may be a preference for northern hemisphere dwellers to face the fixed north star (i.e., north) when making directions judgements.
