Hello and welcome to my disability History Month series!
You can find for two other videos in the links down below.
There are going to be coming up another live stream
Which is going to be about Christmas and disabilities which will be next Friday and in two weeks time
I'll be doing another profile of a famous disabled person. Can you guess who it is?
Today I'm going to be talking about by far the most requested disabled person to profile from my Twitter and you can find a link
a link to my Twitter in the description also subscribe also join the Kellgren-Fozard Club.
Also, you should really eat sugar free ice cream. It's actually really nice
Helen Keller. I cannot say Keller
One of the most famous disabled people to date the popular narrative of Helen Keller is a
classic story about triumphing in the face of adversity.
It emphasizes individual determination over political and social action, but in reality
she had a strong commitment to socio-economic justice, which she saw was instrumental to improving the lives of people with disabilities.
Helen was an American author, political activist, and lecturer.
She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a college degree and she wrote 12 books.
But again, a lot of people have a very simplified understanding of her, as one of my viewers Rebecca Castro pointed out,
She's thought of as either helpless little a girl who was saved by the miracle worker
Ann Sullivan or a noble advocate who overcame her deaf-blindness to write books and give speeches.
Like all people the reality of her life is nuanced
Although yes Keller did achieve a lot and progress both disability rights and awareness
She was also a eugenicist who believed that children with learning disabilities and deformities should be left to die.
Helen was born a perfectly healthy child on June 27th 1818, Alabama.
Her father Arthur Henley Keller had served as a character in the Confederate Army.
Her mother Catherine Everett Keller was the daughter of Confederate General and one of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich.
Keller reflected on this coincidence in her first autobiography
Stating that there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors
And no slave who has not had a king among his.
However, at 19 months old, Helen contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain
Which may have been either scarlet fever or meningitis.
Although she survived, the illness left her both blind and deaf
She recorded in her autobiography, that she felt as if she lived in a dense fog.
Although a popular fiction writes her that way
she was not entirely alone.
By the age of 7 Keller and her family had over 60 home signs. A home sign by the way is a gestural communication
system developed by a deaf person usually a child to communicate with hearing people in their family who don't know sign language.
90% of deaf children are born to hearing families and there is a great disparity among families when it comes to learning full sign language
In many cases only the deaf child will learn full sign language and thus there develops a few
gestures that help communication. Home signs can also be slang
so it's possible for fully deaf family or even friend group to have a few signs that
don't make sense outside of that circle. My wife and I have a lot of home signs that we use to communicate.
Because if you're just joining us, hi, I'm deaf.
I'm also blind in one eye but I tend to forget about that because the other one works perfectly. Slight tangent
But American Sign Language is actually the land of home sign, old French sign language,
Martha's Vineyard sign language, and Plains Indian sign language
They're a melting pot much like the British sign for the US.
Helen later wrote that she found it easiest to communicate with a six-year-old daughter of the family cook
Who understood her signs and who she used to boss around.
Like all children the plasticity of her nature meant that she had learned to live with the disabilities even though she struggled to communicate.
She had no cognitive
Impairments and she was intelligent enough
that she learned to tell who was walking through the house from the vibrations of
their footsteps. Helen's family believed it would be impossible to educate her until 1886 when her mother an account in Charles Dickens
American notes of the successful education of another blind and deaf woman Laura Bridgman
An ear, nose and throat specialist in Baltimore referred them on to Alexander Graham Bell
Yes, that one who was working with deaf children at the time.
More on him later.
Bell helped them to contact very school that Laura Bridgman had been educated at, the Perkins Institute for the Blind.
Rather than send her away to the school, a former student Ann Sullivan herself visually impaired
Moved to the Keller's home to become Helen's instructor and later her companion. Helen forever referred to the day Ann arrived as my soul's
birthday and they were friends for 49 years. Although she wasn't very happy when Ann first arrived. The first few weeks were
tempestuous. Helen hit, pinched and kicked her teacher, even managing to knock out one of her teeth which takes a lot of force.
Ann had brought a doll as a present for Helen and tried to use it to teach
the little girl to communicate by spelling D-O-L-L into her hand.
However, this just really frustrated Helen as she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it and tried again
With a mug but Helen just broke the mug. Eventually Ann gained control
by moving with the girl into a small cottage on the Keller's property away from other distractions.
A month later the breakthrough came when Helen realised that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of my hand as you run water
over it symbolize the name for water.
W-A
T-E-R
Writing in her autobiography the story of my life, but really could've had a more imaginative title
Helen said, "I stood still. My whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers.
Suddenly I had a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought and
Somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me
I knew that W-A-T-E-R meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing of my hand
The living word awakened my soul giving it light, hope and setting it free."
Helen then exhausted Anne by demanding the names of every other familiar object in her world. Oh goddammit, the light's gone.
Through patience and firm consistency, Ann had finally won the child's heart and trust, a necessary step to Helen's education.
In May 1888 Helen began attending the Perkins Institute for the Blind.
In 1894 Ann and Helen moved to New York to attend the Wrght-Humason School for the Deaf.
I think I said that right. And to learn from Sarah fuller at the Horace Mann School for Deaf.
In 1896 they returned to Massachusetts and Helen entered the Cambridge School for young ladies
before gaining admittance in
1900 to Radcliffe College of Harvard University.
Four years later at the age of 24 Helen graduated becoming the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. ever
It's a big deal. She was determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible
And so learned to speak spending much of her life giving speeches and lectures on aspects of her life.
She became proficient at using Braille and reading sign language with her hands
She also led to hear people speak by reading their lips with her hands.
Which if you saw the first live stream in this series the idea with my lovely wife
You'll know that's what I do to understand Claud when we turn the lights off at night. Helen's viewed as being isolated
But she was very in touch with the outside world.
She was able to enjoy music by feeling the beat and she was able to have a strong connection with animals through touch.
Helen was catapulted to national fame when she was just 16 years old for being inspirational.
That was pretty much it. And by the time she graduated Harvard she'd become
Internationally well known.
Much fairer. She graduated Harvard. She went on to become a speaker and author
advocating
Worldwide for people with disabilities and other social causes including women's right to vote, pacifism, and birth control.
She joined the Socialist Party of America and advocated for revolutionary change noting the close relationship between
disability and poverty blaming capitalism and poor industrial conditions for both.
However, despite her fame and strong politics, she was not taken very seriously.
Newspaper columnist who praised her courage and intelligence when she was known purely for being disabled
dismissed her politics for those same disabilities. One even wrote
Mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development. Ugh.
To which she replied that the last time they'd met the compliments
He paid me was so generous that I blushed to remember them. But now that I come up with socialism
He reminds me and the public that I'm blind and deaf and especially liable to error.
I must have shrunken intelligence during the years since I met him, oh ridiculous, Brooklyn Eagle.
Socially blind and deaf. It defends intolerable system. A system
that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness
which we are trying to prevent. Light's gone. These views even landed her on a
1949 FBI list of Communist Party members, although she was a socialist not a communist
but apparently the FBI don't know the difference. Besides, she wrote on a range of topics and
one of them just happened to be
eugenics.
More than awkward... Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aims at improving that an ethic quality of the human population.
The idea is to increase the rates of sexual reproduction among people with desired traits
"positive eugenics" and
Reducing the rates of sexual reproduction among people with less desired or undesired traits, "negative eugenics".
Hmm. Generally through forced sterilization, letting disabled babies die and gas chambers.
It began as a popular theory in the early 20th century and quickly spread worldwide. As a theory,
it does have some merits that we see it active today
If you know there's a particularly vicious genetic disease in your family
You can have your embryos screened and if you choose if you want to only implant those without the disease.
That's the only positive I can think of. On the negative side if this had taken off I would be dead.
I have a genetic disability. Eugenics is not in favor of me living or breeding.
We generally think of eugenics is something and either Nazis did but they actually based their policies on on
California's laws about eugenics and they declared that people unfit to reproduce included people with mental or physical
disabilities, people who scored low in the IQ ranges,
criminals and deviants. It means the gays and members of disfavored minority groups.
Although the Nazis then decided that they didn't want to wait for future generations to not have the traits that they thought of as undesirable.
They just wanted to kill people right away.
Hmm. Also their idea of undesirable traits were flat-out
ridiculous. Helen Keller may have been blind and deaf
But she clearly saw a distinction in her mind between Helen Keller and not Helen Keller people.
She wrote that, "a puny sentimentalism has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred
only when it may be of some use to itself and the world." And
called for
defective babies to be allowed to die.
Partly because she genuinely believed that disability led to a life of criminality.
Which probably says something about her own mindset.
Was she constantly crushing down her own criminal urges because I'm disabled and I'm not.
So as I mentioned earlier, she was lifelong friends with eugenicist and inventor of the telephone
Alexander Graham Bell.
Controversy tangent time! Now everyone knows that Bell invented the telephone
But most people do not know that he was also a deaf educator
and his methodology continues to cause controversy in the deaf community today. Bell's father was a teacher of the Deaf and his mother was deaf herself.
The young Bell would often talk to her by
effectively yelling at her forehead in the belief that the vibrations would pass straight through to her brain, which
isn't exactly how hearing works. Bell strongly oppose marriage between deaf people believing that it created too many deaf people
which
Again 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. So good luck with that. So Bell following in his father's footsteps
Married one of his own deaf pupils Mable Hubbard and then forced her to do any speaking never sign. Great guy. He feared
"contamination" of the human race by the propagation of deaf people and the creation of a separate deaf race
with their own language, culture and society.
He presented a paper Memoir Upon the Formation of the Deaf Variety of the Human Race to the National Academy of Sciences in
1883 in which he wrote that,
"Those who believe as I do that the production of a defective race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world
We'll examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriage of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy." What is this remedy,
I hear you ask?
Removing barriers to deaf hearing interaction. By forcing deaf people to lip read and use their voices,
banning sign language and having legislation to prevent
Intermarriage of deaf mute people and forbidding marriage between hearing people who are both related to a deaf person. Oh,
You think that's all talk? Oh no, no Bell ran a school for the Deaf, remember. The children will be beaten if they use sign language.
Still today, the debate that he started between proponents of oralism, teaching individuals to speak and lip-read, and
Manuelism, teaching sign language in schools for the Deaf, continues.
This crushing of a culture and a group of people created a wedge that hurts more than it helps. Obviously.
Since when is destroying a native society ever helped them? It's a really sticky issue where a lot of wealthy hearing people just like
Waded in and thought that they knew what was best.
I mean, yes, they believe that without speech deaf children would never be able to participate fully in society. Their intentions were good
But oh my god.
You don't put someone on a committee of eugenics just because they enjoy breeding livestock and they once married a deaf person
true story.
Yes,
There are some positives and maybe you think this is a strange thing for a deaf woman who uses her voice
Largely relies on lip-reading and is in a deaf
Hearing marriage to be talking about, but please do bear in mind that the most important thing is and will always be
Choice. The choice of the deaf person. Oh, I didn't realize I have much to say about Alexander Graham Bell.
This is a video about Helen Keller. And uhh,
I'm just gonna move back to talking about her. If you would be interested in my making a video where I rant about
Bell, and the dramas of deafness and oralism then do let me know in the comments and I'll get to work on that.
In the meantime check out Rikki Poynter's channel as she has a lot to say on the topic
And it's blocked by the Alexander Graham Bell Association on Twitter.
I'm not.
Yet. Probably will be after this video. On the subject of Helen Keller and the relationships of deaf people
You might not know that she was not actually
unromanced
Most people but not all hey asexuals
Helen wanted love and a life partner. When she was in her thirties her companion Ann Sullivan became very ill and
had to take time away from Helen to rest. Peter Feigin a 29 year old reporter for the Boston Herald stepped into
act as Helen's secretary in her place. The pair fell in love and made plans to marry but Helen's family vigorously
disagreed and crushed the relationship.
They felt adamant that marriage and childbearing were not options for a deafblind woman. Under pressure from her family
And without the support of her companion Helen gave in and sent Peter away. "How alone and unprepared
I feel, especially when I wake in the night," she wrote to Ann.
She's remembered for proving that people with disabilities can achieve success and triumph over societal norms
But though she was able to speak up about equality and the rights of others even speak up in favor of other disabled people
sexuality being recognized
She was not granted that which she sought for. It could also be argued that the image of saintly-ness
and purity that had been thrust upon her is constrictive to frame her just in that way claiming that she
solved the personal challenge disability through sheer optimism and
Perseverance is to miss
the wider issues that she fought to rectify. The controversial parts of her life are brushed over when we learn about her in school
The socialism, the romance, the eugenics, again
but we need to learn about those things in order to see her as a whole human being as every disabled person should be. And,
when one in four disabled adults in America lives below the poverty line, I'm pretty sure her socialist politics are still very relevant.
She is more than just an inspiration
She fought for true equality and she deserves to be regarded equally, she was not all perfect, but she was not all evil either.
I hope you've enjoyed this video and that you stay tuned for my Christmastide videos.
Make sure you tune in on Monday though, when there's gonna be a vlog of Claud and I buying our Christmas tree
Oh my god, so excited. Bye bye!