“Once
I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things.
Then love came and set my soul free. Once I knew only darkness and stillness.
Now I know hope and joy.”
“I
was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions of the blind. For
the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control,
found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often
caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil
contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to a life of shame that
ended in blindness.”
–
Helen Keller
A
woman who had no eyes, no ears but heard the world & saw the world. She
never felt difficulties due to her disabilities & enjoyed the world. A
disable person always needs a support but she gave the support to other blind,
deaf & dumb people. She made her life an example for them who have
everything but living a hopeless & depress life or for those women who
thinks she is facing the worst. Helen Keller shown that how worst can be the
best.
Helen
Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Helen Keller was
born with the ability to see and hear. At 19 months old, she contracted an
illness. The illness left her both deaf and blind. At that time, 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, Keller had more
than 60 home signs to communicate with her family.
In
1886, A physician J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist
in Baltimore referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working
with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins
Institute for the Blind at Bridgman. Michael Anagnos, the school's director,
asked 20-year-old former student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired, to
become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship
during which Sullivan evolved into Keller's governess and eventually her
companion.
Anne
Sullivan arrived at Keller's house in March 1887, and immediately began to
teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with
"d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present.
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. Keller's big 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.
Starting
in May 1888, Keller attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind. Then they 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, they returned to
Massachusetts and Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies. 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, Keller learned to
speak, and spent much of her life giving speeches and lectures. She learned to
"hear" people's speech by reading their lips with her hands—her sense
of touch had become extremely subtle. She became proficient at using Braille and
reading sign language with her hands as well.
Keller
went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an
advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. She was a
suffragist, a pacifist, an opponent of Woodrow Wilson, a radical socialist and
a birth control supporter. In 1915 she and George Kessler founded the Helen
Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to
research in vision, health and nutrition. In 1920 she helped to found the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller traveled to 40-some-odd countries
with Sullivan, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the
Japanese people. Keller met every U.S. President from Grover Cleveland to
Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander
Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain.
Keller
was a member of the Socialist Party and actively campaigned and wrote in
support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. Newspaper columnists who had
praised her courage and intelligence before she expressed her socialist views
now called attention to her disabilities. The editor of the Brooklyn Eagle
wrote that her "mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her
development." Keller responded to that editor, referring to having met
him before he knew of her political views: At that time the compliments he paid
me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out
for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and
especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years
since I met him. ... Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it
defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the
physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.
Keller
wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles. Keller suffered a
series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home. 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.
Keller
devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for
the Blind. She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, at her home. She gave
everything to society. According to her -
"The
few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The
country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the
land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are
working people. So long as their fair demands—the ownership and control of
their livelihoods—are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor
women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression
in order that the small remnant may live in ease."
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