Helen Keller was a social activist and suffragist, lending her name to the labor movement and the women’s movement. “This inferiority of woman is man-made,” she said in a speech in 1916.
Written Features
Rethinking disability representation on-screen
Pop culture and the enduring legacy of Helen Keller
Helen Keller and Me – Why it was “her doomed love life that really made me identify”
Two poems influenced by Helen Keller’s legacy
What Helen Keller’s little known journalism taught me
Helen Keller biography and timeline
Video Features
Video Features [Accessible Versions]
Clip | Elsa Sjunneson: DeafBlind fencer, hiker, published author [Audio Description + ASL]
Clip | Elsa Sjunneson: DeafBlind fencer, hiker, published author [Extended Audio Description]
Clip | Helen Keller studied socialism [Audio Description]
Clip | Helen Keller the suffragist [Audio Description]
Clip | Keller’s use of oral communication [Audio Description]
TRANSCRIPT
- [Narrator] Throughout the next decades, Keller would lend her name to big causes. She joined the labor union, Industrial Workers of the World, and was in the Vanguard of the women's movement.
- [Descriptive Narrator] A headline: "Hellen Keller in 'Suff' Parade."
- She was a suffragist. She supported women's right to vote.
- [Descriptive Narrator] Georgina Kleege.
- [Georgina] She said somewhere that she saw being female as more of a disability than being deaf-blind, because women didn't have the vote.
- [Descriptive Narrator] Rebecca Alexander.
- There's a defiance in Helen Keller that I have always related to. That resonates so loudly with me. The defiance is that she will not be defined.
- [Descriptive Narrator] Hellen Keller speech, 1916.
- [Keller] This inferiority of woman is man-made.
- [Descriptive Narrator] A photo of women suffragists, marching.
- [Descriptive Narrator 2] Closing title, Becoming Helen Keller. Text, Premieres Tuesday, October 19th, nine o'clock, eight central time. Logo, PBS. Watch on the PBS video app.