Beyond Eugenics

by Gigi Anders

JUNE 26, 2008 TAGS: DISABILITIES, ICONS, COPING, HISTORY COMMENTS (2)

Who was Helen Keller? Though she couldn’t see or hear, she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe. She was a publicity machine who used her assets to get what she wanted. She was a saint who suffered alone in her dark silence. She had a lover; she was asexual. She spent her long life writing, socializing, espousing Socialism, traveling internationally, hanging out with presidents and movie stars. She died at 87 on June 2, 1968. She never aged; she’ll forever be the 6-year-old Patty Duke played on Broadway and in the movie The Miracle Worker.

Forty years after her death, what does Helen Keller mean to us today?

“This is an important time to rethink her,” says Kim Nielsen. “Because Keller is the most famous person with disability in U.S. history, how we remember her matters to people with disabilities and everyone else.”

A professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, Nielsen is Keller’s biographer and has spent the past decade immersed in her life. After writing The Radical Lives of Helen Keller and Helen Keller: Selected Writings, Nielsen admits to some Keller fatigue and yet, “There’s tons and tons yet to be done on her.” At least a thousand pounds of those tons is people’s perception of Keller as an aberration, extraordinary, and that wasn’t how she lived her life or wanted to be perceived.

“She was more, like, ‘Oh gosh, I have to do laundry today,’” Nielsen says. “And yeah, she hung around famous people because she was one of them. And it’s true that together Keller and [her teacher] Annie Sullivan did amazing things. But none of us want to be eternal pioneers. It’s way too exhausting.”

Equally exhausting and frustrating to Keller, Nielsen says, was being remembered only for the things she did before she was 10, an image the 1959 William Gibson play reinforces, rendering a view of the disabled as eternal children. When kids study the work, “They’re torn. They see Keller throwing food and beating up adults and doing things they secretly want to do and know they’re not supposed to. But at the same time, they’re supposed to feel sorry for her — that whole trope of the little blind girl.”

Helen Keller the person was able to partly transcend that because of her parents’ hope and dream that she could be educated.

“Remember, this was during the birth of the Eugenics movement,” Nielsen says. “It would have been very easy for them to hide her away, put her in an asylum. Instead, they insisted on an IEP [Individual Education Plan]. By not dismissing her and seeking an education for her, they took her seriously as a human being, and that’s incredibly important.”

Helen Keller’s father, Arthur, was a captain in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and editor of a newspaper, the North Alabamian. His second wife — he was a widower — and Helen’s mother was Kate, who also had two subsequent children, Mildred and Phillips Brooks. There were two half-brothers as well, from Arthur’s first marriage, James and Simpson. Though Helen was born healthy on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, at 19 months she abruptly came down with “brain fever” (possibly scarlet fever), which left her deaf, blind, and as uncontrollable as a trapped animal.

In The Story of My Life, Helen’s first book — she wrote 14, plus hundreds of magazine articles and speeches — published in 1903 when she was a 22-year-old Radcliffe student, she wrote:

“I do not remember when I first realized that I was different … but I knew it before my teacher [Annie Sullivan] came to me.… Sometimes I stood between two persons who were conversing and touched their lips. I could not understand, and was vexed.… This made me so angry … that I kicked and screamed until I was exhausted.”

In 1886, the Kellers met with Alexander Graham Bell, who encouraged them to contact The Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, from which Annie Sullivan, whose own eyesight fluctuated throughout her life, had graduated. Sullivan, then 20, arrived in Tuscumbia on March 3, 1887, to be Helen’s full-time teacher-governess. “The most important day of my life,” Helen called it. The indefatigable Sullivan taught her student-charge the manual alphabet, or finger spelling, and Braille. The moment Helen connected Annie Sullivan’s finger spelling w-a-t-e-r into her palm with the cool liquid running across her other hand, it was her “soul’s sudden awakening.”

A tough, intuitive, outspoken Irish Catholic, Sullivan convinced the Kellers that Helen needed to be educated up at Perkins. Once they agreed, Sullivan became her family.

“They were incredibly good friends and relied upon each other in ways that changed their lives throughout their lives,” Nielsen says.

In 1916, Sullivan was ill and went to Puerto Rico for treatment, her first separation from Helen. In Sullivan’s absence, a journalist named Peter Fagan, 29, became Helen’s temporary secretary. The two had common political beliefs — they were Socialists — and fell in love. They planned to elope, but the romance became public when they applied for a marriage license. Helen’s mother (her father had died in 1896) quickly quashed the relationship and Fagan was exiled.

The affair was “a little island of joy surrounded by dark waters,” Helen said.

“It was the height of Eugenics,” Nielsen says. “People thought it unseemly for the disabled to marry or reproduce. Blind girls were discouraged because people believed that they wouldn’t be able to do the proper household tasks and duties. It may have been traumatic for Keller, but in context it was not diabolic on the part of her family to remove Peter from the scene.”

In 1924, Keller and Sullivan joined the newly established American Foundation for the Blind (www.afb.org) in New York City, which supported them as blind and deaf-blind advocates and fund-raisers throughout the world. After Sullivan’s death in 1936, Keller continued her political and social activism, working for the AFB until the end of her life.

“Helen Keller’s an enigma,” says Helen Selsdon, the Helen Keller archivist at the AFB. There are 149 cubic feet of material, including 289 manuscript boxes of her letters. “I still have a hard time getting my head around her abilities, because they were so extraordinary.”

Where are our Helen Kellers today? The disability rights movement, which began in the 1970s, led to the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 and the current academic movement called disabilities studies. These are significant milestones. And yet aren’t we still mired in one form or another of Eugenics?

“Absolutely,” Kim Nielsen says. “I think Keller’s story is part of a larger, ongoing debate: What are our responsibilities to each other as human beings? Who gets to be defined as a fit person? Who is a worthy human being?”