American Author, Political Activist, and Lecturer Helen Keller
HELEN KELLER was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. She was born with the ability to see and hear, but at the age of nineteen months old, she contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. Within a few days after the fever broke, Keller's mother noticed that her daughter didn't show any reaction when the dinner bell was rung, or when a hand was waved in front of her face. The illness left her both deaf and blind. As she grew into childhood, she was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs. By the age of seven, she had more than sixty home signs to communicate with her family. Even though blind and deaf, Helen had passed through many obstacles and had learned to live with her disabilities. She learned how to tell which person was walking by from the vibrations their footsteps would make. The sex and age of the person could be identified by how strong and continuous the steps were.
In 1886, her mother read of the successful education of another deaf and blind child and with Helen and her father went to Maryland to see specialist Dr. J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist for advice. Dr. Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Mr. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked 20-year-old former student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired, to become Helen's instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship during which Ms. Sullivan evolved into her governess and eventually her companion.
On March 3, 1887, Ms. Sullivan went to Helen's home in Alabama and immediately went to work. She began by teaching six year-old Helen finger spelling, starting with the word "doll," to help Helen understand the gift of a doll she had brought along. Other words would follow. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug.[19] Keller's breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.
Helen was viewed as isolated, but was very in touch with the outside world. She was able to enjoy music by feeling the beat and she was able to have a strong connection with animals through touch. She was delayed at picking up language, but that did not stop her from having a voice. In May 1888, she started attending the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1894, she moved to New York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, and to learn from Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf. In 1896, Helen entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College. In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She maintained a correspondence with the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover her literary talent.
Determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible, Helen learned to speak, and spent much of her life giving speeches and lectures on aspects of her life. She learned to "hear" people's speech by reading their lips with her hands—her sense of touch had heightened. She became proficient at using braille and reading sign language with her hands as well. Shortly before World War I, with the assistance of the Zoellner Quartet, she determined that by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop she could experience music played close by.
Helen went on to become a world-famous speaker and author, who wrote a total of twelve published books and several articles. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. The Deaf community was widely impacted by her. She traveled to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches about Deaf people's conditions. She was a suffragette, pacifist, radical socialist, and birth control. In 1915, she and George A. Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition.
On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States' two highest civilian honors. In 1965, she was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame at the New York World's Fair. Helen devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind.
To learn more about Helen Keller and the Helen Keller International organization, visit the website by clicking here!
