BTW, has anyone besides me heard of Laura Bridgman? While not the activist that Ms. Keller was, she was the first deaf-blind person to be educated in the US. Helen’s mother read about Bridgman and wrote to the Perkins Institution for the Blind, which was a school for the blind in Boston, and hired another of their students, Annie Sullivan, to go to Alabama and teach her own daughter. While Bridgman never gained the success and fame that Keller did, it is directly due to her intelligence and education that Helen Keller recieved her.

I think the problem with the way Keller’s lifestory is presented is it’s often “Look! Look at how much she accomplished DESPITE! her handicap!” Whereas what Keller accomplished in her life is interesting in and of itself.

What’s most interesting to me about what you’ve posted is that the correct narrative here is, as you suggest, the polar opposite: Look how much she accomplished because of her disability. It’s clear that Keller’s socialism was rooted in her experience of the world as a person with disabilities, that she had an empathy and an understanding of the capriciousness of fate that she might not have had if she had had her hearing and sight. Similarly, Anne Sullivan’s assistance might have been aided by her own experience with partial blindness.

I feel like the pervasive understanding of disability as a tragedy overlooks the fact people with disabilities often have much-needed different skills perspectives from able people and can serve not as lessons-by-negative-example (which is the deservedly hated very special episode version of this sentiment) but as people who can legitimately kick the asses of able-bodied people (like that guy with carbon fiber legs from a couple pages back).
Gnatalby´s last blog ..End of Time Part II– Bloated and Ridick, but not Without Charm

That “overcoming hardship” narrative is of course demeaning as other folks have commented, but also serves to rewrite history in the interest of those in power. Radical leftists have had our history written out of the official history. If we learned about Keller’s critique of capitalism, we might get ideas.

“I’m trying to say something about how we (the collective “we” of Canadian & American society) don’t consider histories of women like Hilary Clinton or Amelia Erhart to be overcomer stories, but whenever you add disability to the mix, it’s “overcomer!!” And that’s just part of the inherit ableism in the system.”

That’s really interesting! Of course historically race and gender have both been things that we looked at successful women/POC as “overcoming,” but it’s not true so much now, is it? I thought of this line from othello:

Duke of Venice [to Brabantio]:
And, noble signior,
If virtue no delighted beauty lack,
Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

Very true.

I think the problem with the way Keller’s lifestory is presented is it’s often “Look! Look at how much she accomplished DESPITE! her handicap!” Whereas what Keller accomplished in her life is interesting in and of itself.

I’m trying to say something about how we (the collective “we” of Canadian & American society) don’t consider histories of women like Hilary Clinton or Amelia Erhart to be overcomer stories, but whenever you add disability to the mix, it’s “overcomer!!” And that’s just part of the inherit ableism in the system.

This next comment is more related to academic women’s history than popular women’s history, but this seemed like an appropriate place to put it: Women’s/gender historians need to start thinking about disability, and not just in the sappy, “overcoming disability”-type ways. Disability is woefully absent from the rather large body of academic women’s history–even when it is relavent. I recently attended a talk by one of the leading historians in the field who discussed her recent work on a particular historical figure, a fairly well-known woman. This historical figure had a disability, albeit one which many might consider “minor.” This lauded historian did not engage with disability issues in her presentation except to present the historical figure as having “triumphed” over her disability through strength of character and will. While the historical figure said a fair bit about how influential acquiring and living with a disability was for her, her biographer’s disability analysis was very shallow in comparison to the analytic depth with which other issues are treated. Ignorance about disability and disability theory leads to writing incomplete histories.