Helen Keller: Not A Silent Figurehead

Helen Keller: Not A Silent Figurehead

March 30, 2021 | By Kendra Knight

You have heard of this month’s featured historical figure. Multiple plays and movies have portrayed her early struggles of learning to communicate despite being left deaf and blind after illness (see The Miracle Worker, 1962), but I’ll bet that there is a lot about Helen Keller’s life that would surprise you. 

helen keller

Helen Keller was born June 27, 1880 in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, to Arthur Henley Keller (an editor of a local newspaper and former captain in the Confederate Army) and Catherine Everett Adams Keller. When she was 19 months old, Keller contracted an intense illness (we’re not 100% sure what, but possibly meningitis, rubella, or scarlet fever) that left her both deaf and blind. Growing up unable to see or hear, Keller made up her own signs to communicate with family members and household servants, but refers to this period of her life as feeling like a ship “at sea in a dense fog” searching for light (The Story of My Life, 1903). Anne Sullivan, who experienced a horrific childhood and was nearly blind herself, became Keller’s educator after being referred to her from the Perkins Institute of the Blind. The story of Sullivan’s work teaching Keller to communicate is how we know these women best. 

However, the most impressive accomplishments of Helen Keller’s life took place after The Miracle Worker story ends.

To learn, Keller had to depend almost entirely on the sense of touch: reading Braille writing with her fingers, feeling a person’s hand signing in her own, or gently holding her fingers on a person’s mouth while they spoke to “read” their lips and feel the vibrations in their throat. Despite this dependence on others, Keller persisted with getting an education and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor's degree from Radcliffe College (the sister school to Harvard University, which women were not allowed to attend at the time) in 1904. This was an astonishing achievement that demonstrated Keller’s great intellectual abilities. But Helen Keller did not define herself by her disabilities the way that we tend to today. She did not view being deafblind as a weakness except in how often other people underestimated her because of it. She actually stated that the sexism she faced as a woman was more of an issue than not being able to see or hear. Keller did not let these limitations hold her back.

One of Keller’s main inspirations was her faith. She described her Swedenborgian beliefs in the book My Religion (1927) and explained in a later essay “Swedenborg’s message has meant so much to me! It has given color and reality and unity to my thought of the life to come; it has exalted my ideas of love, truth, and usefulness; it has been my strongest incitement to overcome limitations” (“How I Would Help the World,” 1935). She saw Swedenborg’s Writings giving a clear message to help and serve the less fortunate around us. Keller strongly believed and lived the statement from the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg that “the life of religion is to do good” (Doctrine of Life, 1). 

Helen Keller’s method of doing good was to advocate for progressive reforms in many different areas of life. She was very opinionated about politics and current issues. As scholar Susan Fillippeli asserts, "The saint was in actuality a spitfire, and her rhetoric was forceful and furious" (Fillippeli, The Radical Rhetoric of Helen Keller, 1985). Keller spoke out (in articles and persuasive pieces, but also by giving speeches) about a broad range of issues from labor rights to healthcare to women’s suffrage to pacifism. In 1909 she joined the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World (a famous labor union). She participated in the first Women’s March on Washington, D.C. in 1913, and was supposed to be a featured speaker at the event, but was “so exhausted and unnerved” by how the female marchers were attacked by angry onlookers and law enforcement that she declined to speak (Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1913). We know how she felt about women’s rights, though: “Men are never so absurd as when they urge the inferiority of women” (Speech to delegates of the Woman’s Party, June 11, 1916). In 1915 she founded Helen Keller International (which still exists today) to focus on the causes and treatment of blindness and malnutrition. She placed the blame for blindness and malnutrition on big businesses prioritizing profits over the wellbeing of their employees. In 1920 she co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU, you’ve probably heard of it) to help individuals whose rights had been violated by more powerful groups. Helen Keller was radical even by today’s standards. In 2000, she was named one of TIME 100 Persons of the Century for her work.

So why do we all know the story of Helen Keller learning to communicate as a child, but rarely hear about her accomplishments as an adult? 

Historians (such as Susan Fillippeli, Beth A. Haller, and Kim E. Nielsen) claim that Keller’s story has been intentionally softened because her truth made her too controversial. She pushed a lot of people’s buttons, especially with her adherence to socialism. Even while Keller was still alive, many tried to dismiss her liberal politics while trying to use her as a silent figurehead for people with disabilities. Keller pushed back against that portrayal of herself, consistently proving that her disabilities did not define her, and that despite not being able to physically see or hear that she noticed and understood much about the world around her that others did not.

 To truly honor her accomplishments, we should attempt to do the same.

“Over the gate of an ancient castle in France is the motto, ‘Plus est en vous – There is more in you.’ When those words carved in stone centuries ago were spelled into my hands, my spirit responded eagerly, ‘True – true every one of us.’ I repeat, there is more in you than you know.”

  • Helen Keller, “We Can Do More,” Home Magazine, 1934