I am not sugar and spice and everything nice. I am music, I am art. I am a story. I am a church bell, gonging out wrongs and rights and normal nights. I was baby. I am child. I will be mother. I don’t mind being considered beautiful, I do not allow that to be my definition. I am a rich pie strong with knowledge. I will not be eaten.
this is from a real diary by a 13-year-old girl in 1870. teenage girls are awesome and they’ve always been that way.
Read this – oh my goodness, this girl was wonderful.
Cite your sources! People always want to read the book or article!
From here
DS HOOBLER, DOROTHY Real American Girls Tell Their Own Stories; by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler. Atheneum, 1999 104p illus. with photographs ISBN 0-689-82083-6 $12.95 R Gr. 4-6 Through excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, readers discover the child- hoods of American girls from a variety of class, cultural, and historical perspec- tives. The voices of twenty-four girls span the eighteenth through twentieth century. Arranged in brief topical sections, “Best Friends,” “School Days,” “In Trouble,” “Just Having Fun,” “Boys,” and “Becoming a Woman,” the excerpts come from primary sources, mostly from the mid to late 1800s. Many readers will recognize Louisa May Alcott and Red Cross founder Clara Barton, but most of the names will be unfamiliar, such as the Winnebago Mountain Wolf Woman or Helen MacKnight, one of the first women doctors in the U.S. The excerpts are humor- ous, distinctive, and implicitly feminist, while covering topics and feelings that will resonate with contemporary readers: “Have come across such a glorious book called ‘Boys Play Book of Science.’ Am going to read it through and see if whether ain’t some experiments Bess and I can try. Won’t it be jolly if we really can? But it takes money money money even for the privilege of blowing one’s self up”- from the diary of Martha Carey Thomas, 1870. The writings range from the girlish voice of a nine-year-old, to Mountain Wolf Woman’s poignant recounting of her first menstruation, to an incident of prejudice recalled by an Asian Ameri- can teenager. The best excerpts are diary entries which engage readers through the immediacy of first person and the specificity of time and place: “I don’t want to be alive when the year 2000 comes, for my Bible teacher says the world is coming to an end then, and perhaps sooner.” Black-and-white photos (unfortunately uncaptioned) and a list of credits accompany the text. This book should find readers among the fans of the American Girl or Dear America series and can serve as a springboard to history and journal writing.
And yet fanfiction is an inherently transformative work which, by its very nature, strives to address or change some flaw that exists in canon, even if that flaw is “why isn’t there more of this thing?!” Fanfiction has addressed the lack of gay men by making straight characters gay; it’s addressed countless cultural misappropriations with wildly varying AUs; it’s addressed canon plot holes and timeline issues with fix-it fics and crossovers. Fanfic is the show your show could be like, if only you dared to dream.
But for all its transformative nature, fanfiction and fandom still suffer from a real dearth of femslash. Beyond the simple fact that very few girls exist in canon materials, the societal emphasis on the male gaze seems to have affected fanficcers’ creativity to such an extent that even in our own fantasies, we cannot give women a fair shake. Just as the answer to “Why is there so much slash?” cannot be boiled down to “ Well, straight girls are horny”, the answer to “Why isn’t there any femslash?” cannot be boiled down to “Well, straight girls don’t care.” The bias against female characters and female pleasure is an ingrained, institutionalized problem which won’t go away on its own.
There are many things I love about Phryne Fisher. One of the biggies is how much she likes and is protective of women.
And one of my favourites:
An autistic, academically gifted university student in an otherwise all-male student body is framed, stalked, bullied and slandered.
Phryne doesn’t lay the blame on her, fixate on her differences or say her treatment is justifiable. She imitates her behaviour to understand it, opens up her home as a safe haven, and tries to see the world from the girl’s perspective rather than deciding to coach her to pass.
The way that we learn about Helen Keller in school is an absolute outrage. We read “The Miracle Worker”- the miracle worker referring to her teacher; she’s not even the title character in her own story. The narrative about disabled people that we are comfortable with follows this format- “overcoming” disability. Disabled people as children.
Helen Keller as an adult, though? She was a radical socialist, a fierce disability advocate, and a suffragette. There’s no reason she should not be considered a feminist icon, btw, and the fact that she isn’t is pure ableism- while other white feminists of that time were blatent racists, she was speaking out against Woodrew Wilson because of his vehement racism. She supported woman’s suffrage and birth control. She was an anti-war speaker. She was an initial donor to the NAACP. She spoke out about the causes of blindness- often disease caused by poverty and poor working conditions. She was so brave and outspoken that the FBI had a file on her because of all the trouble she caused.
Yet when we talk about her, it’s either the boring, inspiration porn story of her as a child and her heroic teacher, or as the punchline of ableist, misogynistic jokes. It’s not just offensive, it’s downright disgusting.
the reason the story stops once hellen keller learns to talk is no one wanted to listen to what she had to say
how’s that for a fucking punchline
It’s not that I disagree that we should all be aware of what a badass Helen Keller became, because she had a long and amazing career as an activist and yes, a feminist hero. It’s that somehow when people talk about the ableism of the way Helen’s story is told they always seem to forget this: Anne Sullivan, her teacher, was blind. Seriously. From Wikipedia:
“When she was only five years old she contracted a bacterial eye disease known as trachoma, which created painful infections and over time made her nearly blind.[2] When she was eight, her mother passed away and her father abandoned the children two years later for fear he could not raise them on his own.[2] She and her younger brother, James ("Jimmie”), were sent to an overcrowded almshouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts (today part of Tewksbury Hospital). He, who suffered a debilitating hip ailment, died three months into their stay. She remained at the Tewksbury house for four years after his death, where she had eye operations that offered some short-term relief for her eye pain but ultimately proved ineffective.[3]“
Eventually some operations did restore part of her eyesight, but by the end of her life she was entirely blind. Also:
"Due to Anne losing her sight at such a young age she had no skills in reading, writing, or sewing and the only work she could find was as a housemaid; however, this position was unsuccessful.[2] Another blind resident staying at the Tewksbury almshouse told her of schools for the blind. During an 1880 inspection of the almshouse, she convinced an inspector to allow her to leave and enroll in the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, where she began her studies on October 7, 1880.[2] Although her rough manners made her first years at Perkins humiliating for her, she managed to connect with a few teachers and made progress with her learning.[2] While there, she befriended and learned the manual alphabet from Laura Bridgman, a graduate of Perkins and the first blind and deaf person to be educated there.”
So Anne Sullivan, disabled and born into serious poverty, learns the manual alphabet from a deaf and blind friend; passes that alphabet on to her deaf and blind student. This isn’t the story of an abled-bodied teacher swooping in to ‘save’ a disabled child; it’s a series of disabled women helping each other. Helen Keller’s story is the story not of one badass disabled woman, but of two. Anne and Helen were lifelong friends; Anne died holding Helen’s hand.
Also is there a book called “The Miracle Worker”? I thought that was the movie/movies based on “The Story of My Life” by Helen Keller. But I could be wrong. And I didn’t learn any of this in school in general but that’s neither here nor there.
I can recommend the ‘62 version of “The Miracle Worker” with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. It’s blatant about Sullivan’s impoverished background and eye problems – her rage on Helen’s behalf isn’t abstract at all, it’s very, very personal. And that’s the most amazing thing about this movie: Anne and Helen are the angriest people on earth. I have no idea if that was erased from the remakes but in the original they are both allowed to have a ton of anger about what has been done to them and what they have been denied.
Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. Here’s a picture of Helen Keller meeting Charlie Chaplin:
omfg I am so mad right now because not only did the kids biography of Helen Keller I read when I was younger erase all her activism, but it very explicitly completely erased anything about Anne being blind herself.
There were scenes of her WATCHING Helen from across the room or yard, and it was all very “oh my, I just MUST save this poor little disabled girl, no other deaf blind person has EVER BEEN EDUCATED and basically it was awful and shitty.
I think everyone should read Helen and Teacher. It’s an absolute brick of a book, hundreds of pages, but it is wonderful. It’s about their whole lives, right up to Helen’s death in old age. It talks about Helen’s feminism, socialism, and campaigning for everything from equal rights to sexual health. Helen Keller was not a syrupy, greeting card girl who existed to make able people feel warm and fuzzy, she was a tireless academic, political activist and writer. She was making noise about the issues she cared about from the moment her partnership with Annie Sullivan began, and she never stopped.
knitting in the dark 