Name: Deaf, Blind and Awkward // Helen Keller // #DisabilityHistoryMonth [CC]
Uploaded: 2020-04-06T07:57:30.000Z
Duration: 17 min 35 s
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Hello and welcome to my disability History Month series!

You can find for two other videos in the links down below.

Future continuous

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Much fairer. She graduated Harvard. She went on to become a speaker and author

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

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Deaf, Blind and Awkward // Helen Keller // #DisabilityHistoryMonth [CC]

ridiculous

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poverty