American Council of Learned Societies. - The Radical Lives of Helen Keller

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The Radical Lives of Helen Keller

Kim E. Nielsen

Consulting Editor: Harvey J. Kaye

To Nathan

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org

2004 by New York University
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nielsen, Kim E.
The radical lives of Helen Keller / Kim E. Nielsen
p. cm. (The history of disability series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0814758134 (hc : acid-free)
1. Helen Keller, 18801968.
2. Helen Keller, 18801968Political and social views.
3. Blind-deaf womenUnited StatesBiography.
4. Blind-deaf womenEducationUnited States.
I. Title. II. Series.
HV1624.K4N54 2003
362.4'1'092dc21 2003014386

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Unlike previous Hellen Keller biographers, I come to Keller as a historian trained in womens political lives in the twentieth-century United States. As a child I did not read Kellers mythical story or connect intensely with her image. Neither am I particularly interested in Anne Sullivan Macys education of her. Amazement with her disability and her accomplishments didnt prompt this book nor did a desire to commemorate her. My intellectual interests center around how U.S. women have justified, explained, embraced, fought for, and lived out their citizenship on personal, familial, local, and national levels. Helen Keller interests me because she was one of the most influential and widely recognized women of the twentieth century, whose primary interests were political but whose political life has been largely ignored.

The best part about writing on Helen Keller is the people I have met along the way. The generosity, intellectual energy, good spirits, and collegiality of the disability studies community are unparalleled. Paul Longmore and Lauri Umansky served as model editors, responding with good cheer to questions large and small. Susan Burch, Derek Jeffreys, Murdoch Johnson, Harvey Kaye, Linda Kerber, Brynne Thomas, and Dianne Tuff read the manuscript at pivotal moments and offered sound advice. Linn Heider is doubly talented, providing loving childcare and spotting me on the bench press. Commentators, fellow panelists, and audience members at meetings of the Organization of American Historians, Society for Disability Studies, Berkshire Conference on Womens History, Southern Historical Association, and the University of Wisconsin-System Womens Studies Conference offered insightful comments and vigorous questions. All helped to make this book better.

Without librarians, archivists, and financial assistance I could not have finished this book. Staff members at the American Foundation for the Blind gave repeated assistance cheerfully. Thanks also go to Perkins School for the Blind, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Library, and the Library of Congress. The interlibrary loan staff at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay found every item I sought. The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay also provided financial assistance.

Finally, as always, my deepest appreciation goes to Nathan, Morgan and Maya. They make life infinitely richer and endlessly interesting.

I do not like this world as it is. I am trying to make it a little more as I would like to have it.

Helen Keller, 1913

Anne Sullivan, Keller insisted, transformed her from Phantom to Helen. As an elderly woman she referred to her pre-Sullivan childhood self as Phantom the little being governed only by animal impulses. She believed her teacher enabled her to become fully human by teaching her language. It was the first major transformation in her life.

College similarly transformed Keller from a child to an adult. Many considered her disability to mean that she would be forever childish and childlike, regardless of age. She was never able to dismantle everyones debilitating assumptions about her disability but graduating from Radcliffe radically changed her own. Becoming an adult meant moving away from the highly insulated life of a middle-class young girl made even more isolated by fame, deaf-blindness, an Alabama farm, and a Boston institution for blind children. Becoming an adult meant moving away from Tuscumbia and Perkins, turning to teachers and a world beyond Sullivan, wrestling with self-sufficiency on all levels, and embracing herself as fully human. It is frustrating that most of our cultural memories of Helen Keller end before she even got this far.

When Helen entered Radcliffe College in 1900 at twenty years of age, she encountered a knot of conflicting messages. Radcliffe, the female counterpart to Harvard, was one of the premier colleges for young women.

To enter college, Keller had not only to deal with her allegedly disabled female body but also the supposed failings of her actually disabled body. By the time she entered Radcliffe, she had endured nearly twenty years of deliberations as to whether or not she had the capacity to learn, to communicate, or simply to be decent in a public space. While to her, the thought of going to college took root in my heart and became an earnest desire, to others her college admission was unadvisable, unnatural, and even dangerous. The skeptical interpreted any physical ailment of hers as evidence of a nervous and physical breakdown due to overwork, proof that her body was unable to withstand the rigors that college demanded of even the normal female body. Anne Sullivan, critics insisted, had to be the real brains and student of the duo, since surely Kellers disability rendered her incapable.

Radcliffe thrilled and unsettled her. She mastered French, German, Greek, and Latin, but the structural impediments were huge. Few books were Brailled. Sullivan had to finger-spell most written materials and all course lectures, a time-consuming and physically taxing process for both of them. Sullivans eyesight, which multiple surgeries had improved, now weakened seriously. Looking back in 1956, Keller remembered the agony caused by Sullivans ailing eyes: How I hated books at that moment! When she asked if I did not want certain passages reread, I lied and declared that I could recall them. The measures taken by Radcliffe during examinations, intended to prevent Sullivan from giving Keller the answers,

Radcliffe was also personally isolating. Helen admitted, I have sometimes had a depressing sense of isolation in the midst of my classmates. Few could communicate with her. She lived apart from the rest of the students and was already a celebrity. The academics were intellectually exciting and provocative: My soul was set aflame! Yet she grew frustrated at the failure of her professors to link course materials to contemporary and personal conditions: Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. This frustration may have deepened because of her passion for and dependence on the written word, which intensified while at Radcliffe. As she put it, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends.