When we think about disabled people, especially famous and historic disabled folk, one of the very first people who comes to mind has to be Helen Keller. If you’re like me, Hellen’s story, or a simplification of it, was a common story heard during childhood. It was usually told, in my youth at least, as a story about faith and working hard and how good god is, but her life was also used as a tool for “never giving up” and why we should “be grateful.” While her story is a beautiful one, it’s far from unique, at least regarding how people have used her and her life to try to shame folk into not being weaklings. And we are gonna talk all about that, as well as what her story really was. Let’s go!
First of all, Helen was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama in 1880. Her father was a proud Confederate Army captain, a former lawyer, as well as later working as a local newspaper editor. While it is reported that he “would never be intentionally unkind to people of colour”, he held a strong opinion that everything southern was inherently noble, and that black folk “weren’t human beings.” I personally don’t think you can dehumanize people and still “never intentionally be unkind to them,” but I suppose Mr. Keller and I disagree. Capt. Arthur Keller had been married before he met Helen’s mother Kate to a woman named Sarah. Sarah died in 1877 and left Arthur with 2 children. Less than a year after her passing, Arthur married Kate, the soon-to-be mother of Helen, another daughter, and a son.
Helen’s mother, Kate, who was ushered into marriage at 22 years of age, making her 20 years the junior of Captain Keller, is often referred to as “an educated young woman.” She was a Memphis belle who came from a great deal of money and, reportedly, was waited on hand and foot from day one. A silver spoon, situation, if you will. Her life had always been quite luxurious and pampered, but once she married Arthur Keller, that all came crashing down around her. Captain Keller was referred to by his friends and colleagues as "a gentleman farmer who loved to direct rather than work.“ Due to Captain Keller no longer practicing law and choosing to take up plantation life, money was quite scarce. There were a few black slaves who helped run their plantation, but the majority of the work fell on the shoulders of his young wife, Kate.
Their home was fairly simple, built by Helen’s grandparents, but resided on a 640 acre plantation. The home was covered with English Ivy, which is where the name “Ivy Green” for Helen’s homestead came from.
When Helen was born, she was a classic, able-bodied child. But at 19 months old, she contracted a disease that included a severe fever - perhaps scarlet fever or meningitis - that left her without hearing, sight, or speech. Becoming deaf, blind, and mute in early childhood is incredibly rare, but it has also been pointed out by experts that those numbers might have actually been higher in the early 20th century, but that killing disabled infants was common and accepted practice.
Deaf-blind children were greatly disdained by even their own parents in the 18 and 1900’s, often considered possessed or a physical expression of their own sins and failings. I am sure it did not help that deaf-blind children would often express their frustration with not being able to communicate by throwing temper tantrums, including scratching, biting, hitting, and so on. And Helen was no different. She was regarded by her family as “a monster” as she would put her hands into people’s food, pinch her family members, and smashed dishes and other breakable items. Being unable to see or hear the reactions of her family, she was unaware of the harm she was causing. Regardless, friend and family alike insisted to Kate that her daughter was mentally defective and should be locked away in an asylum. Kate wouldn’t hear of it. She continued to keep her daughter at home, even as her acting out increased, especially after Kate and Arthur had a second child.
Even before the mysterious illness, Helen was using what today we would call “baby sign language.” She had signs for everything from nodding for yes, shaking her head for no, and acting like she was shivering when she was requesting ice cream from her mother. She indicated she wanted her father by mimicking the motion of putting on glasses, her mother by laying her hand on her face, and her sister by sucking her thumb. She had even begun to speak a few words like “wah-wah” and “tea tea tea!” before she lost her verbal communication. While her mother had thought that her using these signs were hindering her learning to speak, once Helen lost her ability to communicate verbally, the natural inclination to sign for things was a huge boost in her ability to still communicate. How much she could understand through these methods is definitely still up for debate, but according to some of Kate’s writings, by age 5 Helen could help fold laundry, and could identify her own articles of clothing.
Helen wrote in her book The Story of My Life that as she grew older she became aware that people around her did not communicate by signs, but with their mouths. She writes that sometimes when she was in the presence of two people speaking to one another, she would touch their lips as they spoke (the origin of this shitty blind trope, perhaps) and then move her own lips while gesturing wildly and could not understand why she still wasn’t understood. She explains that it was so alienating and frustrating, that she would devolve into kicking and screaming until she wore herself out. And this frustration with not being understood, not being able to communicate, only grew s she did. Her parents were concerned that as she got older things would just get worse, including her acting out. They wrote that they were worried that eventually her tantrums would cause actual harm to Helen, or those around her. Her mother also mused that she was very concerned that her daughters disabilities would leave her open to an increased risk of sexual assault. A valid concern, as currently the statistics show that 83% of women and afab people with disabilities will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, and 50% of deaf girls are sexually abused (vs 25% for hearing folk). For humans with developmental disabilities, 80% of women and 30% of men have been sexually assaulted, and 50% of those cases the individuals have been assaulted more than 10 times. I can’t imagine that those odds were lower a hundred years ago.
When Helen was 7, a woman named Anne Sullivan was sent from the Perkins School for the Blind to Tuscumbia to work with and teach her. It was beyond a difficult few weeks and months, as Helen had not developed trust or established any communication with this new person. Helen fought her teacher, acting and lashing out in her frustration, to the point of even knocking out one of Anne’s teeth! But Anne didn’t give up. In fact, she moved into a cottage on the plantation with Helen so they could be around one another at all times, and truly connect and form a bond of trust. After some time, Helen did gain a deep affection and trust for her teacher. Helen’s education could now begin.
Anne worked with Helen on learning to finger-spell the names of various common objects into Helen’s hands - a technique developed over 50 years prior. Keller loved this tactile experience, but wrote in her book that she didn’t piece it together until that oh-so-famous moment where Anne spelled “water” in one of her hands while pumping water over Helen’s other hand. After this moment, the sky was the limit for Helen. She touched and spelled out everything she touched, as well as its functions! Anne worked diligently with her to expand her vocabulary, and also helped teach her about conversational etiquette.
When Helen was 8 years old, Anne brought her to the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. This changed Helen’s life, as she wrote that she finally had friends to play with, other blind children, and almost all of them could finger spell and therefore talk to one another! Helen wrote, upon arriving at the school, “Oh, what happiness! To talk freely with other children! To feel at home in the great world!” This was such a beautiful and positive experience that, from that year on, Helen spent almost every winter studying at Perkin’s. She loved the community, as well as the library filled with embossed books, and the tactile museum’s collection of animal specimens.
When she was 11, Helen wrote her very first story which she gave to the director of Perkin’s. He loved it, and published it in their alumni newsletter. However it came to light, much to Helen’s surprise, that it was very similar to another story that Helen read in the library, but had since forgotten. The story she wrote was a recreation of these subconscious memory fragments. She was accused of plagiarism, which hurt her feelings and those of Anne Sullivan, very deeply. To the point that they both left Perkin’s and never returned. But as she grew up and learned a bit about life, Helen forgave Perkin’s for the hurt feelings, and donated many braille books to their library, as well as officiating the opening and dedication of Perkin’s Keller-Sullivan building, which housed their new deaf-blind programs.
Helen spent the rest of her life as a loud and proud advocate for economic equality, women’s rights, and disability justice. She continued to state that she, and all disabled people, deserved “to feel at home in the great world.” In her incredible life, she co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was one of the earliest supporters of both the NAACP and birth control, and publicly and strongly opposed lynchings. She was a member of the Socialist Party and read Marx, H.G. Wells and William Morris, and because of her association with leftist groups, the FBI closely monitored her for ties to the Communist Party. In 1919 she wrote to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founder Eugene Debs that she was “Yours for the revolution!” and “May it come swiftly like a shaft sundering the dark!” She became an IWW member very shortly after. She supported strikes and held her ground at picket lines. She wrote often for The Liberator. She railed against capitalism as she observed the deep ties between disability and poverty. She insisted on revolution, not reform. She spoken very openly about how she felt that charity for the poor and disabled was far more about making privileged and abled folk feel good and relieve guilt than it ever was about actually helping and improving the lives of marginalized and vulnerable groups. Earlier in her life, I suspect because of the world she was raised in and her own internalized ableism, she supported some eugenics theories, but later in life, denounced them whole-heartedly.
Helen Keller is everything that I have ever wanted to be. But we never hear about all her activism, beyond her assisting with fundraising for The American Federation for the Blind which was an apolitical organization, the leaders of whom didn’t appreciate Helen’s “radical” stances. I think that part of the reason we hear about her hands under the water and little else is at least two fold:
If you look at Helen Keller as a whole person, including her strong stances on socialist/generally-doing-right-by-all-people, then you have to come to terms with someone that is historically idolized as being political. And people really like to avoid that, if possible. It’s much easier and more convenient to just think of her as that deaf-blind-mute girl who pulled herself up by her bootstraps. But that mentality is one that Helen actively pushed back against! She wanted disability justice, and better for everyone, not swooning over some imaginary moral high ground of someone having to struggle and suffer.
Inspiration porn. People LOVE to use disabled people as either inspiration or a tool of guilt (or both). If you pay attention, you can see this everywhere. When a video goes around on the socials with a disabled person doing something cool, abled people get all hot and bothered to either hold them up as a paragon of “oh my goodness, good for you, little fella! You’re such an inspiration!” or use the fact that a disabled person can do something as some sort of twisted guilt/motivation for why abled people should also do the thing and more! “See this world-class adaptive athlete? Oh wow, such inspiring! Us abled folk have no excuse not to get out run/bike/climb, because IF A DISABLED PERSON CAN DO IT…”
While Helen wasn’t an athlete, the mechanisms of ableism are all the same. “If this deaf-blind girl could learn to read and write, abled people must be able to do anything if we work hard enough! Because… you know… if a disabled person can accomplish something, obviously we can!” No, sweetie. I mean, maybe you can do The Hard Thing, but look…
If you saw an abled person doing A Hard Thing, you wouldn’t automatically think “well obviously I can do that!” You’d even subconsciously pause to acknowledge what an amazing human they are, and how absurdly hard they’ve worked over years to accomplish what they have! But when folks see disabled people doing A Hard Thing, the immediate response is “well if they can do it, I have no excuse!” or “Oh wow, look at how incredible it is that a disabled person can do A Hard Thing!”
It’s not that we are seen as equal, strong, hardworking humans. Oh no. We are so often viewed through a lens of pity and less-than, so when a disabled person does something that abled people do, or even reach high levels of accomplishment, no one sees you as a hard-working human, they see you as a crip who somehow managed to do a thing. I’ll never forget the time I was going into my office (for the business that I owned), and as I opened the front door to my building, a woman walking by on the sidewalk stopped and clapped for me and shouted “yes girl, oh my god, yes! You go! You’ve got this! You can do anything!” I was just opening a fucking door. It was so fucking uncomfortable and demeaning. And far from an isolated incident.
And see, when you’ve set someone up to be little more than inspiration porn, you stop seeing them as a real person. And it gets sticky when your Inspo Porn is a strong, outspoken woman who yelled all day every day about disability justice, abolishing capitalism because it holds people, disabled and abled alike, in poverty, and demanding revolution. It’s hard to make a disabled person who never stops (very publicly) saying how disabled people fucking deserve better and is advocating for the abolition of the systems harming us into a poster child of “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” So, our educational system and media in general have downplayed all her social stances, her whole life’s work, and just keep talking about her 7-year-old hand in the water. Because a small, struggling, but stubborn child is much easier to use to prop up comfortable narratives than a whole-human who pushed back against most of what was comfortable at the time (and still is, tbh).
So that’s Helen Keller. Well, there’s always more to discover about this amazing human, but that’s a quick overview. An OG strong disabled woman who would roll over in her grave if she knew how her story was usually told. And I, for one, both as a disabled person but also just as a human, am so grateful for all the amazing work she did over the course of her life. Her advocacy and activism is goals! And the next time you see someone using Helen Keller as inspiration porn or to uphold the idea that “there’s no disability but a bad attitude,” you too can push back against and call out that absolute ableism. And maybe Helens incredible life can truly inspire you - not because she is disabled and did A Thing, but because in the face of everything a sexist, ableist, capitalist society was throwing at her, she never stopped fighting to make things better for EVERYONE.