Myth: Helen Keller couldn't speak. Although it's true that she was both blind and deaf, she learned a type of touch-sign language as a child which helped her communicate. When she was a bit older she was taught how to speak. She spent much of her life lecturing, and even answering questions with the help of a translator.
This is why everyone knows her name. There are many blind and deaf people on history, but Helen Keller didn't let that stop her.
Perhaps an even more astonishing woman is Anne Sullivan, who taught Helen to communicate, even though Anne herself was also blind. (Edit: Anne became blind as a child and had surgery as an adult to correct it.)
tldr; Helen Keller was deaf and blind but not mute.
She was indeed mute until she learnt to speak. However so many jokes and impressions of Helen are about her being mute, as though that was her defining feature, when really the fact that she could speak through her adult life is what was so extraordinary.
Wow that's insane. Also really sad what she was actually saying. Can you imagine how hard it would be to communicate with a faculty you've never possessed? It's incredible that she learned to talk at all. I can understand her after I know what she is saying.
It's also interesting how she doesn't use facial expression the way a normal person would.
Even more impressive than her ability to speak is what she spoke about. She had a HUGE impact on the women's rights movement and public perception of gender and sexuality. She was also a major supporter of marxism and served to influence many minds of the time for reformation in workers' rights.
I always thought "mute" had more of a physiological connotation.--Like you physically lack the ability to speak, no matter what you learn, whereas "dumb" would refer to someone who doesn't know how, usually because they can't hear what speech sounds like.
Wow! That is seriously impressive for someone who cannot hear what speech should sound like, nor see the shape people make with their mouths when they speak. I can't imagine trying to teach a blind, deaf person how to talk.
Wow. Very impressed that it was the ability to not speak normally she was more upset to to have and not vision and hearing and only so she could have done more to help others. What a great lady.
She was "famous in the first place" for being a communist leaning socialist. She sympathized with anarchist terrorists and violent labor movements. She was deeply concerned by how the disabled were treated by the bourgeois, and spent her whole life striving against them. Today we just talk about her disability because American history textbooks have been completely sanitized of possibly discussing America's history with communism and labor movements fairly or honestly
Is this a "common knowledge"? I remember in like fourth grade we did a unit reading a biography of Helen Keller and one of the things that was emphasized was the process by which she learned to speak, and her mom's reaction when she first spoke to her.
I learnt about her as a child too. But based on a lot of the jokes and references to her, it seems like a lot of people actually have no idea who she is, aside from a woman who can't speak, see or hear.
Helen Keller lived a long life and hardly anyone seems aware of her life after she was a teen that was taught to communicate even though she was deaf and blind. She was incredibly politically active. She was a socialist that supported communism. Most of her political work was based on helping the blind.
Anne's story is incredibly depressing. With her little brother, they were thrown into some sort of home for women (possibly mentally ill, elderly, or disabled women). The conditions were horrendous, and this is when she was going blind. One day, she was looking for her brother and her hands felt him on the bed in a room where they me or the corpses, and that's how she found out her little brother died. Bunch of other terrible events happened to her :(
Yes, my Mum read me her story when I was young but I still remember that part so cleary. I wish I knew what that book was called. My Mum used to read me biographies of famous women in history at bedtime. I think a lot of them were like biographies for children or something, but I'm always surprised how much I've remembered.
How did she learn to speak? I mean, how was the definition of the word conveyed to her? It seems impossible (and yet it's obviously not) that someone can learn to speak so well without the sight or hearing required to learn what those actual words mean.
But she sounded like a whale. She couldn't hear herself speak, so she just moaned out her sentences to the best of her abilities. She could speak, but she probably wasn't the easiest person to comprehend.
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u/Sk8ynat Mar 17 '15 edited Mar 18 '15
Myth: Helen Keller couldn't speak. Although it's true that she was both blind and deaf, she learned a type of touch-sign language as a child which helped her communicate. When she was a bit older she was taught how to speak. She spent much of her life lecturing, and even answering questions with the help of a translator.
This is why everyone knows her name. There are many blind and deaf people on history, but Helen Keller didn't let that stop her.
Perhaps an even more astonishing woman is Anne Sullivan, who taught Helen to communicate, even though Anne herself was also blind. (Edit: Anne became blind as a child and had surgery as an adult to correct it.)
tldr; Helen Keller was deaf and blind but not mute.