Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia in USA in 1880. Her father Captain Arthur Helen Keller had fought with the Confederate army of Vicksburg. He edited a news weekly and was periodically a US Marshall. She had a brother and a sister.
At the age of 18 months a serious illness, meningitis, destroyed her sight and hearing. Before her illness she was a healthy child. For 5 years she grew up as wild and unruly, giggling and chuckling to express her feelings. She could not understand how to tell and she kicked and screamed. But her father and mother Mrs. Kate Keller didn’t believe in punishing their handicapped, child. Her father took her to Dr. Alexander Graham Bell in Washington who was an activist in deaf education. He advised him to write to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. Annie Sullivan was offered to tutor her. In March 1887, Annie arrived Tuscumbia - Alabama to live with her as a governess.
Helen learned to communicate many of her wishes with various signs - these were some 60 gestures which she frustration led to behavioural problems. When she misbehaved her teacher Annie Sullivan treated her as a perfectly normal child and gave her punishment. With the support of her family and the training of Anne, she realized that the life was worth living and she could achieve anything if she was determined.
In spite of her losing her sight and hearing, she learnt to do small tasks such as folding laundry and getting things for her mother. She later said, "Sometimes I stood between two persons who were conversing and touched their lips. I could not understand and was vexed. I moved my lips and gesticulated frantically without result. This made me so angry at times that I kicked and screamed until I was exhausted."
Annie Sullivan began to use fingers spelling in Helen’s hand to name objects. Helen quickly learnt the finger spell patterns, but considered them a game and did not yet relate them to names of objects. She did not accept her teacher’s authority and continued wild ravings. After sometime, the problem of her behaviour was brought under control, but she did not understand words.
When she was seven years old she had a vocabulary numbering hundreds of words and was forming simple sentences. Much of her communication was by finger spelling, but she had also learned the shapes of letters. Meanwhile she could print using block letters, for writing she used a grooved writing board that was placed over a sheet of paper and wrote the letters in the grooves, writing with a pencil and guiding the end of the pencil with the index finger of her left hand. In 1887 she also learned the Braille alphabet.
At the age of 8 Helen left Alabama and went to Perkins School in Boston with Annie. Helen was exposed to a wonderful array of resources and her abilities increased. She learnt quickly and had an exceptional memory for details. Her capacity for quick learning and relation gave her the name of ‘miracle’ child.
There she also learnt Latin, French and German. At the age of nine she began to learn to speak. Sarah Fuller, her speech teacher, had her feel the shape of her mouth she spoke, feeling inside the mouth to feel the position of the tongue. Helen shaped the sounds on her own. First she learned to say letter sounds and then syllables. She spent many years trying to perfect her speaking ability even into adulthood. She also learned to read lips with her fingers. It was a brand new form of communication that Helen began to use immediately. At the age of 14 she enrolled in the Wright - Humson School for the Deaf in New York where she made remarkable progress in learning to speak.
At the age of 16 entered the Cambridge school for ‘Young Ladies in Massachusetts and studied history, literature, mathematics, astronomy and physics. Then she went on to Radcliff College and graduated there in 1904 with honours. During her graduation she wrote ‘The Story of my Life’ for the Ladies Home Journal.
Her next battle was the public indifference to the welfare of the handicapped. She devoted the rest of her life to promoting social reforms. Her aim was to educate and to give treatment to the blind and deaf. She won many awards for her humanitarian work. She helped put a stop to placing blind and deaf individuals in mental asylums. As a pioneer in educating the public in the prevention of blindness of the newborn.
She wrote articles in newspaper and magazine about the relationship between sexually transmitted diseases and blindness in a newborn child.
She toured Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa and lecturing about the need to improve the lives of disabled people. In 1929 she wrote the second volume of her autobiography. ‘Midstream : My Later Life’. At the age of 36, she fell in love with Peter Fagan 29 years socialist and news paper man who was hired to help Helen Keller while Annie Sullivan was ill. He had been hired to help Helen. He declared his love and told her that she was beautiful. She had never been told such things before. They decided to marry secretly. A reporter had found an application for a marriage license by them in the city records. Her mother came to know about this matter. Peter was immediately relieved of his duties and sent away. The romance died. Although there were a few follow up letters between them of course in Braille.
She wrote, "The love which had come, unseen and unexpected, departed with tempest on his wings. The love remained with her as ‘a little island of joy which is surrounded by dark waters." In her last few years Helen Keller lived on into retirement. She often walked the grounds of -Arcan Ridge- and could be talking to herself with her fingers. Her fingers were her windows to the world - which fluttered with unspoken memories of her long and wonderful life.
Many books were written about her and several plays and films were made on her life. She became so famous that she was invited abroad and received many honours. Without the help of Annie Sullivan the faithful teacher who accompanied her everywhere for almost fifty years. Helen perhaps would have remained trapped within an isolated and confused world Annie’s health was failing. She lost her sight and there was an ‘internal disorder’. In 1935 in the month of October Annie - Helen’s teacher, companion and dearest friend died.
Helen Keller lived a long and successful life. She died on 1st of June 1968 at the age of 88 just before her birthday. She will always be remembered as one of the greatest woman in the world.
Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia in USA in 1880. Her father Captain Arthur Helen Keller had fought with the Confederate army of Vicksburg. He edited a news weekly and was periodically a US Marshall. She had a brother and a sister.