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.
loving how my old history teacher talked about them like a terrorist group
boost me up
Wow okay so for those skimming, there’s a memo up there from THE DIRECTOR OF THE FBI that sets a mission to LIE about the good things the Black Panthers were doing, spread rumors of them being terrorists, and terrorize the communities supporting them.
If you think the Black Panthers were terrorists and you’ve never heard of the community-building, it’s because there was a literal government conspiracy to make you and people 45 years ago think that way.
i’m reblogging again (bolding mine), because people need to fucking know this. especially white americans.
To show how far the terrorist lie spread – I’m white, on the other side of the world, and until I first saw this post, that lie was about the only thing I ‘knew’ about the Black Panthers.
Hoo boy, we’re going deep down the rabbit hole with this one. I hope you’ll bear with me, as this might be will be a disturbing post. Here, have some shirtless!Seb as a precautionary measure:
He’s laughing at me because I’m kind of a masochist. Anyway, check back with him if you need to.
I have German heritage on both sides of my family – my paternal great-great grandparents came over sometime in the early 20th century (don’t know much about them) and my maternal grandmother grew up in Nazi Germany. Plus I was a history major specializing in European history from 1871 to the Cold War. So…I know some things. You could chalk up all that to another reason this movie was like catnip to me. That said, it will take a bit to unpack all of this, so bear with me.
The idea of there being a superior race was pretty much unheard of before European imperialism and the Atlantic slave trade. Before then, Europeans didn’t have much cause to compare themselves to the rest of the world. But over the course of the 17th-19th centuries, that small part of the globe came to control the remaining 85% of the world. Suddenly, they were faced with millions upon millions of “savages,” and had to justify their superiority. Their right to subjugate the rest of humanity.
Eugenics started [in America], Germans just ran with it.
THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS. This is something that we do NOT get taught (or that we didn’t get taught when I was taking community college history classes, let alone high school), and I know it’s just an aside, but THANK YOU.
Nazi Germany based all its initial forays into eugenics on programs in America that were active in over 20 states. That may not really be the topic of this post (which is a good one), but it is very very important to make sure people know.
In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood [sexual] victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.
Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology… Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for… This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.
I genuinely think everyone NEEDS TO KNOW this piece of information. That Freud changed his position, and that that change erased the voices and enabled the further victimisation of millions of women, right up until the current day. Whether you’re an abuse survivor, a professional working with abuse survivors, or just a member of the public, THINK before you dismiss women’s voices, because they have been dismissed for long enough.
Vintage photos from the library of congress capture a time when the country ran on womanpower
Johnnie Phelps, a woman sergeant in the army, thought, “There was a tolerance for lesbianism if they needed you. The battalion I was in was probably about ninety-seven percent lesbian.”
Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day, the general told her, “I’m giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out. We’re going to get rid of them.”
“I looked at him and then I looked at his secretary who was standing next to me, and I said, ‘Well, sir, if the general pleases, sir, I’ll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.’ “
“And he was kind of taken aback a bit. And then this women standing next to me said, ‘Sir, if the General pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelp’s name may be second, but mine will be first.”
“Then I looked at him, and said, ‘Sir, you’re right. They’re lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all the drivers-every woman in the WAC detachment-and there were about nine hundred and eighty something of us-then I’ll be happy to make that list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancy. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since we’ve been here, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious conduct.”
“And he said, ‘Forget the order.’”
The Gay Metropolis, page 47, Charles Kaiser (via bibliothekara)
Phelps tells this story herself in the excellent 1984 documentary Before Stonewall, which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube (she’s at 19:30, but really, watch the whole thing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX7AxQd82H8
Hedy Epstein, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor was arrested on Monday during unrest in Ferguson Epstein, who aided Allied forces in the Nuremberg trials, was placed under arrest “for failing to disperse.” 8 others were also arrested.
“I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager. I didn’t think I would have to do it when I was ninety," Epstein told The Nation during her arrest. “We need to stand up today so that people won’t have to do this when they’re ninety.” Epstein is currently an activist and a vocal supporter of the Free Gaza Movement.
knitting in the dark 