So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘arch priestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and a ‘modern miracle.’ But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.
Helen Keller (letter to Senator Robert La Follette, 1924)
funny how the most popular narrative about helen keller is a harmless little girl who learns to communicate and then the story ends for some reason gee i wonder why that is
(via callmeoutis)
Gee. Why does the popular narrative end before she became a communist? So strange! And the Martin Luther King Jr. narrative does the same thing! What a coincidence!
(via malachite-in-corvidae)
Also, that the narrative is generally about the abled teacher helping her and how amazing she was to be able to do it. As the wikipedia article frames it: “The story of how Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker.” So even the story about Helen Keller is often not really about her.
(via ami-angelwings)
Helen Keller is a glaring example of it, but history’s dominant narratives are full of women whose stories are depoliticised and infantilised in order to make them more “inspirational”.
A current example: when Malala Yousafzai is the brave little girl who just wanted to learn, she’s the world’s darling, but when she tells Obama that drone strikes are driving terrorism the cameras all turn off.
(via sharpestrose)
I believe that this BS would fall under “inspiration porn”, too.
I got her first book at a thrift store for 95 cents and figured “Hey, it’s short. I can read that.” because I read a few books about her in school, you know? Seemed sensible to read her own words.
Then I find out she was a communist!? 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 She got more awesome by an order of magnitude.
(via jabberwockypie)
Helen Keller is AMAZING. She was one of the first people who really campaigned for sexual health, because one of the leading causes of blindness in her era was caused by infant exposure to an STI during vaginal birth. The blindness was easily and cheaply preventable by putting a solution in the newborn’s eyes, but this was rarely done because the stigma around sex and STIs was so pronounced. Helen started publicly pushing for every infant to get this treatment when she was still a child, fundraising and educating people and saving the sight of many, many people.
I think everyone who has an interest in Helen and her teacher Annie Sullivan should read Helen and Teacher. It’s an absolute brick of a book, but it’s incredibly interesting and an intricately detailed biography of Helen from birth to death, not just during the childhood years publicised and sanitised for the public’s palette. Read my review on GoodReads here.
knitting in the dark 