Helen Keller

Hillary

Looking back, I realize that there weren’t many lessons in elementary school about famous women. I remember my teachers mentioning Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth I, and Joan of Arc. I found them interesting, but they didn’t capture my attention the way Helen Keller did. It may seem surprising now, but all of my schooling took place before kids with disabilities had a right to accommodations that would allow them to attend public schools. From kindergarten to high school, I didn’t have classmates with physical disabilities. But in 1957, when I was ten, I saw a production of The Miracle Worker on Playhouse 90, a television show that presented high-quality dramas. This dramatization of Helen’s life as a deafblind young woman, and her journey with her teacher, Anne Sullivan, allowed me to imagine her struggles and rejoice in her achievements.

Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in the small town of Tuscumbia, Alabama. At nineteen months old, she got sick. The illness was never diagnosed, but it left her both deaf and blind. She couldn’t go to school or be left on her own. She developed a system of rudimentary signs to communicate basic needs to her family, but was isolated, frustrated, and prone to fits of rage in which she lashed out at anyone who came near her.

One day, reading Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation, Helen’s mother, Kate, came across the story of Laura Bridgman, a deafblind girl who was being educated at what is now known as the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts. In Laura’s story, Helen’s mother saw a glimmer of hope for Helen. Her parents applied to have a teacher sent to Tuscumbia.

Anne Sullivan arrived at Helen’s home in Alabama on March 3, 1887, a day Helen later called “my soul’s birthday.” That beautiful turn of phrase has always stuck with me—what a perfect way to capture the moment of meeting someone who will go on to change your life for the better. Anne was a twenty-year-old Perkins graduate, herself visually impaired. She had her work cut out for her: “Virtually her first act on meeting the new teacher was to knock out one of her front teeth” reads one account in The New Yorker. But Anne recognized Helen’s fierce intelligence. She taught Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, which Helen quickly memorized. On a fateful day in April 1887, Anne brought Helen to a water pump and spelled “water” into her palm. It clicked in Helen’s mind that the words she was spelling corresponded to things in the world around her. “Somehow,” Helen said later, “the mystery of language was revealed to me.” Soon she was being celebrated in newspapers across America and Europe. At age eight, she met President Grover Cleveland at the White House. When Helen’s dog died, contributions poured in from all over the country to replace her beloved pet. Instead, she asked the well-wishers to donate to a young boy who wanted to attend the Perkins Institute; they raised enough money to send him to the school.

From an early age, Helen was determined to go to college and was admitted to Radcliffe College of Harvard University. Anne went with her to every class, spelling out lectures as quickly as she could into Helen’s palm, transcribing pages of text into Braille. In 1904, at the age of twenty-four, Helen graduated cum laude, becoming the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. (It seems not to have occurred to Radcliffe to give Anne a degree along with Helen, though she, too, had put in hours of work.) Helen wrote, gave speeches, and published her autobiography, The Story of My Life, all while still in college.

CHELSEA

In books and movies, Helen is often shown as a larger-than-life hero, almost impossibly determined in the face of suffering and obstacles—and she was. But Helen also had flaws, fears, and moments of longing, like anyone. “If I could see,” she once said, “I would marry first of all.” In response to the question of whether she ever wished she were not deafblind, she acknowledged that “perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times. But it is vague, like a breeze among flowers. The wind passes, and the flowers are content.” She also asserted: “Blindness has no limiting effect upon mental vision. My intellectual horizon is infinitely wide. The universe it encircles is immeasurable.”

Helen’s story is usually told as that of one remarkable young woman who overcomes adversity through sheer force of will. It’s also a story of the potential in every child—potential that too often goes unrealized because of circumstances out of the child’s control. If Helen hadn’t learned to read, communicate, and express her thoughts, if she had been committed to an institution, as many people with disabilities were in that time, we would have missed out on her brilliant mind and remarkable spirit. I thought of Helen when I played a small part as a young lawyer working for the Children’s Defense Fund, helping convince Congress to pass legislation mandating that children of all abilities were entitled to a public education.

Helen’s most thrilling adventures began where The Miracle Worker left off. After college, she set out to learn more about the conditions and lives of people with disabilities in America—a subject about which little was known—and quickly identified a connection between disability, exploitation, and poverty. At the time, the vast majority of people with disabilities were cut off from job opportunities or education, sidelined and marginalized in society. “For a time I was depressed,” she said, “but little by little my confidence came back and I realized that the wonder is not that conditions are so bad, but that humanity has advanced so far in spite of them. And now I am in the fight to change things.”

Contrary to some of the legends that surround her, Helen was not simply an inspiring individual focused on people with disabilities; she was an activist determined to build a more just, peaceful, and equitable world for everyone. She cofounded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in part to protect the rights of workers who were striking for better conditions and fair pay. Along with the other ACLU founders, she was a target of FBI surveillance. She was a socialist and a pacifist, a suffragist and a birth control advocate. (“The inferiority of women is man-made,” she argued.) She spoke out against lynching and white supremacy and was a vocal supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

“Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

—HELEN KELLER

Helen traveled the world, speaking out against fascism in Europe. In 1938, she wrote to the editor of the New York Times, urging the paper not to downplay or ignore Nazi atrocities. In 1948, she went to Japan as America’s first goodwill ambassador after the war; there, she helped bring attention to the country’s blind and disabled population. At age seventy-five, she embarked on her most grueling trek yet: a forty-thousand-mile, five-month tour across Asia to bring encouragement and hope to people with vision loss and other disabilities.

Helen was famous from the age of eight until her death in 1968, and like most people in the public eye—particularly women—she was subject to criticism. She was accused of plagiarism, of being a mouthpiece for the views of the people around her, as though a young deafblind woman couldn’t possibly hold and express her own opinions. When she spoke about her own life and struggles, she was celebrated. But when she spoke about politics and social issues, she was dismissed and belittled as being out of her depth. “So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly… but when it comes to discussion of a burning social or political issue, especially if I happen to be, as I so often am, on the unpopular side, the tone changes completely,” she observed.

To some people, shocking though it may seem, she remains a controversial figure even today. I thought again about Helen’s commitment to giving every child the chance to go to school when I heard in 2018 that the Texas State Board of Education had recommended eliminating lessons about both Helen and me from American history classes in an effort to “streamline” the curriculum. I felt sorry that students in Texas would not be taught about Helen’s extraordinary life and the impact she has had on so many others. When the board reversed its decision and reinstated us both, I was doubly happy. Her story deserves to be told again and again—the story not simply of an extraordinary little girl but of a woman who spent her life questioning why things were the way they were, and standing up for people who had no power.

“I like frank debate, and I do not object to harsh criticism so long as I am treated like a human being with a mind of her own.”

—HELEN KELLER