Helen Keller and All the People of the Earth
A user-contributed article by Rev. Rus Cooper-Dowda
Helen Keller and "...All 'Peoples' of the Earth"
Yesterday I received yet another mailing from the school where I earned my undergraduate degree. I really have to give the alumni association credit. As often as I have moved since graduating in 1979, they have never failed to find me. This really amazes me since, in all those twenty-one years, I have never sent them a change of address notice.
But, back to yesterday's mailing. On it was the school logo and its motto that reads, "God Has Made Of One Blood All Peoples Of The Earth." That may not read as earth shattering to you. But twenty years ago it read " ...all 'Men'..."
I and a group of my student friends agitated for that change during the time we were at the school. Not only were we shunned for our request and ridiculed for being feminists, but we were actually 'tried' as witches when a very old Bible was stolen from the archives of the school library.
Part of that questioning included having our butts measured by campus security to see if we would have fit in the hole left when the glass door was broken in the robbery. I am not making that up.
Another part of the investigation included the order that we get people we knew to write the school to tell the administration if they had ever seen us practicing witchcraft. If we didn't do that our degrees would have been held up.
In any event, I revisited that nightmare yesterday when the college mailing came and Women's History Month officially started. I thought of how I was not the first woman to be given a difficult time while trying to achieve.
One such woman was Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) who was the first fully licensed woman doctor in the United States. When she attempted to start medical college in Geneva, New York, her fellow male students got to vote on whether to let her in.
A real women's history favorite of mine is Victoria Clafin Woodhull (1838-1927). She and her sister, Tennessee, were the first women stockbrokers. They gave financial advice to Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Victoria declared herself a candidate for presidency in the 1872 election. She was the first woman to do that and started a party, the Equal Rights Party, to back her.
She never got a chance to try to vote for herself. On Election Day she was in jail for swearing in public! Victoria was also a free love advocate. That and marriage into royalty took her to England toward the end of her life. There she slept sitting up nightly because she was afraid of dying if she slept lying down.
Another courageous favorite of mine is Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood (1802-1887). She was the first woman to plead before the United States Supreme Court.
Indeed, in 1879 Congress had to pass legislation to make it possible for her to do that. She also ran for president in the elections of 1884 and 1888 on the National Equal Rights Party ticket and got more than 4,000 votes.
At one point she said, "We shall never have equal rights until we take them, nor respect until we command it."
But the women's history figure that means the most to me is Helen Keller (1880-1968), who wrote, " Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."
She was an author, a public speaker, a fund raiser and a person with disabilities. She was deaf and blind. Helen graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904 and learned French, German, Greek and Latin. She was given an honory Ph.D. from Harvard. She wrote 14 books and hundreds of articles.
But she was not all sweetness and light. She was not the plaster saint the public and her handlers preferred. The Helen I admire initially refused to help advertise the availability of talking books because they did not help the deaf/blind. Role models need the space to be wrong on some things, even Helen Keller.
The Helen I care about was a spiritualist and a socialist at a time when it was considered foolhardy to be either. The Helen I try to emulate struggled to get her individuality out past the whims of her handlers.
As a mom with disabilities, I grieve for the Helen Keller who was treated as asexual and barren. I ponder what current access law, however shaky, would have done for the quality of her life. Even at this late date and time, I wish the majority of us would let her grow up past the word for water and the pump in the backyard.
The community of people with disabilities are still treated as non-sexual and not parental material. We are still treated as Labor Day Peter Pans on crutches who will never be allowed to grow up. And the next unsolicted quarter that gets plunked in my hot coffee while I drink it in public will get the capabilities lecture that each disabled person keeps holstered in their response cache.
Helen Keller raised access issues that have yet to be solved in our own time. But if I could talk to her today, I'd say these lines from the poem "Effort at Speech Between Two People," by Muriel Rukeyser: ...yesterday I stood in a crowded street that was alive with people, and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone. Everything silent, moving...Take my hand. Speak to me.
Thank you Dr. Keller. We are oh-so-proud to know you.
A user-contributed article by Rev. Rus Cooper-Dowda
