Helen Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. At
nineteen months, she contracted a high fever and lost consciousness.
When she awoke, she was both deaf and blind. No one understood at the
time that her loss of sight and hearing was permanent.
Although she learned to perform simple
household tasks such as folding laundry, Keller
knew she was different from other children, and
she often reacted to her situation with frustrated
rage. Her parents realized their daughter needed
professional help if she was to live in the real
world. At the age of six, she accompanied her father to Washington, D.C., where Alexander
Graham Bell (1847–1922), the inventor of the
telephone, examined her. Bell had developed a
system of visible speech (sign language) to help
the deaf communicate. He urged Keller’s father
to write to the Perkins Institution for the Blind
in Boston, Massachusetts, to request a teacher.
Enter Anne Sullivan
The teacher assigned to Keller was Anne
Sullivan (1866–1936), and she would remain
Keller’s teacher and mentor for many years and
her friend for life. Sullivan worked with Keller in
the privacy of a small guest house in the Keller family’s backyard. It was important for Keller to be separated from her
parents, who tended to indulge her and give in to her wishes in order to
keep the peace.
Sullivan taught Keller sign language by signing words and names for
things into the palm of Keller’s hand. One day, the pair walked toward a
well, where someone was drawing water. Sullivan spelled the word
“water” into Keller’s hand as she placed her other hand under the spout
to feel the running water. It was at that moment that Keller realized
everything had a name that could be spelled.
With that realization, the world opened up for Keller, and she became immediately curious about everything around her. Sullivan patiently continued to teach her, and soon Keller learned to express herself.
After that came the ability to read Braille, a system of writing for the
blind that uses characters made up of combinations of raised dots. At age
ten, Keller attended the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, where she
progressed rapidly and even learned to speak French and German.
Becomes a reformer
Keller continued her studies at the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf
and the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts, where she
studied history, mathematics, astronomy, physics, and literature. In
1904, she graduated with honors from Radcliffe College.
Keller overcame her physical limitations and came to understand
that the next step was to battle the public’s indifference to the welfare of
the disabled. She spent the rest of her life promoting social reforms
aimed at improving the education and treatment of the blind, deaf, and
mute. Credited with prompting the organization of state commissions
for the blind, Keller was key in the effort to end the practice of placing
deaf and blind people in mental asylums, which was common in the
early 1900s.
Keller did not stop there. She made it her mission to educate the
public in the prevention of blindness in newborns by writing newspaper
and magazine articles discussing the relationship between sexually transmitted disease and blindness in newborns. She traveled across the globe,
lecturing about the need to improve the quality of life of disabled individuals. Her work won many awards and citations.
In 1903, Keller wrote and published the first volume of her autobiography and called it The Story of My Life. The second volume,
Midstream: My Later Life, was published in 1929.
Still friends
Although Keller is the one who received most of the attention and accolades, Sullivan made it possible for Keller to achieve all that she did.
Sullivan married John Macy, the editor of Keller’s autobiography, but she
did not let that interrupt her friendship. Instead, Sullivan continued to
help her former student by manually spelling lectures and reading assignments into Keller’s hand throughout school and college. When Keller
toured on lecture, Sullivan accompanied her and gave her full support.
This mutually beneficial partnership ended with Sullivan’s death in
1936. In 1957, a television play titled The Miracle Worker aired to high
praise. It brought to the world the story of Sullivan and Keller at the
well, where Keller first understood what language and communication
were all about. Two years later, the play went to Broadway and was an
immediate hit. The production ran for nearly two years. It was made into
a movie in 1962 and earned Academy Awards (Oscars) for both actresses
who played Keller and Sullivan.
Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and took that as a sign that
it was time to retire from public life. She was awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom, the highest honor a civilian can receive, in 1964. She died four years later at the age of eighty-seven.