June 27 Birthday of the Day: Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller was born June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama to Captain Arthur H. Keller and Kate Adams Keller. When she was 19 months old, she contracted what was probably scarlet fever or meningitis, which left her both deaf and blind.

Keller's Wikipedia entry reports:

In 1886, her mother Kate Keller was inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deaf/blind child, Laura Bridgman, and travelled to a specialist doctor in Baltimore for advice. He put her in touch with local expert Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised the couple to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston, Boston, Massachusetts. The school delegated teacher and former student, Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired and then only 20 years old, to become Helen's teacher. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship.

The entry goes on to describe Keller's education at the Perkins School for the Blind and then the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. In 1904, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf and blind person to graduate from a college.

Keller became a writer and a speaker. (Sadly!) she was a fervent Socialist and became a member of the IWW. Here is a link to her article "Why I Became an IWW" in which she says:

"Then I was appointed on a commission to investigate the conditions among the blind. For the first time I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of employers. And the social evil contributed its share. I found that poverty drove women to the life of shame that ended in blindness."

She was also, interestingly enough, a Swedenborgian.