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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.

  • 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!

Hello and welcome to my disability History Month series!

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