Helen Keller was born 143 years ago today in Alabama in the US. She’s known because of her writing, speaking, and advocacy for women’s rights (including the right to vote) labor rights, peace, and for disabled people — of whom she was one; she lost her sight and hearing when she was 19 months old.
In the late 1800s, people who couldn’t see or hear were not thought to be able to communicate or, really, do anything else. But when Keller was 7, she met Anne Sullivan, who became her teacher and lifelong companion. Sullivan taught Keller to read and write, and Keller became the first deaf and blind person in the US to earn a BA degree.
She went on to write 14 books, was named one of the “100 Most Important People of the 20th Century,” and her autobiography The Story of My Life was adapted as a play and also made into the film The Miracle Worker. The house where she was born still exists, ad is now a museum and a national historic landmark.
Whatever illness caused her disabilities wasn’t diagnosed at the time, but it could have been meningitis. She developed her own set of about 60 signs to communicate with her family, and said she knew who was who in her house by the vibrations from their footsteps. Anne Sullivan, who was herself visually impaired, was recommended as a tutor for Keller by a series of doctors, educators, and researchers including Alexander Graham Bell, who in addition to inventing telephones and the like, worked with deaf children.
The first, and hardest lesson Sullivan managed to teach Keller was that objects had names. She spelled the names by drawing on Keller’s palm. It took a month of practice, but Keller finally had a breakthrough as Sullivan poured water on one hand and spelled the word on the other. As Keller later wrote, “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!”
Keller went on to learn to speak, and found that she could interpret what people were saying by feeling their lips and throat as they talked. Keller lived to be 87, by which time she was world famous. Many of her archives, though, were destroyed in the September 11 attack that destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York.
There are at least 6 movies about her and her life, and the first one, the 1919 silent film Deliverance, features Keller herself. You can see it on YouTube.
