*·~-.¸¸,.-~*Helen Keller*·~-.¸¸,.-~*
Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, activist and lecturer. She was the first
deafblind person to graduate from college. The story of
how a remarkable teacher broke through the isolation the
lack of language had imposed on the child, who blossomed
as she learned to communicate, are staples of American folklore.
What is less well known is how Keller's life developed after
she completed her education. She was a prolific author,
was well traveled, and campaigned for workers' rights,
women's suffrage, and many other progressive causes.
Early childhood and illness
Helen Keller was born at an estate called Ivy Green in
Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880, to Captain Arthur H. Keller, a former officer of the Confederate Army, and
Kate Adams Keller, a cousin of Robert E. Lee and daughter
of Charles W. Adams, a former Confederate general. The
Keller family originates from Germany, and at least one
source claims her father was of Swiss descent. She was
not born blind and deaf; it was not until nineteen months of
age that she came down with an illness described by
doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the
brain", which could have possibly been scarlet fever or
meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long
time, but it left her deaf and blind. At that time her only
communication partner was Martha Washington, the six-
year-old daughter of the family ********************************, who was able to create a sign language with her; by age seven, she had over 60 home signs to communicate with her family.
In his doctoral dissertation, "Deaf-blind Children
(psychological development in a process of education)"
(1971, Moscow Defectology Institute), Soviet blind-deaf
psychologist Meshcheryakov asserted that Washington's
friendship and teaching was crucial for Keller's later developments.
In 1886, her mother was inspired by an account in Charles
Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of
another deafblind child, Laura Bridgman, and traveled to a
specialist doctor in Baltimore for advice. He put her in
touch with Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with
deaf children at the time. Bell advised the couple to contact
the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where
Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in
South Boston. The school delegated teacher and former
student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and then
only 20 years old, to become Keller's instructor. It was the
beginning of a 49-year-long relationship, eventually
evolving into governess and companion.
Sullivan got permission from Keller's father to isolate the
girl from the rest of the family in a little house in their
garden. Her first task was to instill discipline in the spoiled
girl. Keller's big breakthrough in communication came one
day when she realized that the motions her teacher was
making on her palm, while running cool water over her
hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly
exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other
familiar objects in her world (including her prized doll). In
1890, ten-year-old Helen Keller was introduced to the story
of Ragnhild Kåta, a deafblind Norwegian girl who
had learned to speak. Kåta's success inspired Keller
to want to learn to speak as well. Sullivan taught her
charge to speak using the Tadoma method of touching the
lips and throat of others as they speak, combined with
fingerspelling letters on the palm of the child's hand. Later
Keller learned Braille, and used it to read not only English
but also French, German, Greek, and Latin.
Formal education
In 1888, Keller attended the Perkins School for the Blind.
In 1894, Keller and Sullivan moved to New York City to
attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf and
Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896, they returned
to Massachusetts and Helen entered The Cambridge
School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in
1900, to Radcliffe College. Her admirer Mark Twain had
introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleton
Rogers, who, with his wife, paid for her education. In
1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe
magna cum laude, becoming the first deaf blind person to
earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Companions
Anne Sullivan stayed as a companion to Helen Keller long
after she taught her. Anne married John Macy in 1905, and
her health started failing around 1914. Polly Thompson
was hired to keep house. She was a young woman from
Scotland who didn't have experience with deaf or blind
people. She progressed to working as a secretary as well,
and eventually became a constant companion to Helen.
After Anne died in 1936, Helen and Polly moved to
Connecticut. They travelled worldwide raising funding for
the blind. Polly had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered, and died in 1960.
Winnie Corbally was Helen's companion for the rest of her life.
Political activities
Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and
author. She is remembered as an advocate for people with
disabilities amid numerous other causes. She was a
suffragist, a pacifist, a Wilson opposer, a radical socialist,
and a birth control supporter. In 1915, she founded Helen
Keller International, a non-profit organization for
preventing blindness. In 1920, she helped to found the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller and Sullivan
traveled to over 39 countries, making several trips to
Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people.
Keller met every US President from Grover Cleveland to
Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous
figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin
and Mark Twain.
Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and actively
campaigned and wrote in support of the working classes
from 1909 to 1921. She supported Socialist Party
candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his campaigns for the presidency.
Newspaper columnists who had praised her courage and
intelligence before she expressed her socialist views now
called attention to her disabilities. The editor of the
Brooklyn Eagle wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the
manifest limitations of her development." Keller responded
to that editor, referring to having met him before he knew
of her political views:
“ At that time the compliments he paid me were so
generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I
have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public
that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I
must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I
met him...Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and
deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the
cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness
which we are trying to prevent. ”
Keller joined the Industrial Workers of the World (known
as the IWW or the Wobblies) in 1912, saying that
parliamentary socialism was "sinking in the political bog."
She wrote for the IWW between 1916 and 1918. In Why I
Became an IWW, Keller explained that her motivation for
activism came in part from her concern about blindness
and other disabilities:
“ I was appointed on a commission to investigate the
conditions of the blind. For the first time I, who had
thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control,
found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial
conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of
employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found
that poverty drove women to a life of shame that ended in blindness. ”
The last sentence refers to prostitution and syphilis, a leading cause of blindness.
Keller and her friend Mark Twain were both radicals whose political views have been forgotten or glossed over in their popular perception.
Writings
One of Keller's earliest pieces of writing was "The Frost
King" (1891). There were allegations that this story had
been plagiarized from The Frost Fairies by Margaret
Canby. An investigation into the matter revealed that
Keller may have suffered from cryptomnesia, having once
had Canby's story read to her, only to forget about it,
although the memory had remained hidden in her
subconscious.
At the age of 23, Keller published her autobiography, The
Story of My Life (1903), with help from Sullivan and
Sullivan's husband, John Macy. It includes letters that
Keller wrote and the story of her life up to age 21, and
was written during her time in college.
Helen wrote "The World I Live In" in 1908 giving readers
an insight into how she felt about the world. "Out of the
Dark", a series of essays on Socialism was published in 1913.
Her spiritual autobiography, My Religion, was published in
1927 and re-issued as Light in my Darkness. It advocates
the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, the controversial
mystic who claimed to have witnessed the Last Judgment
and second coming of Jesus Christ, and the movement named after him, Swedenborgianism.
In total, she wrote 12 books and numerous articles.
03 Jan 2008, 09:20 PM
Helen Keller
