International Women’s Day: Celebrating Advocacy

March 8 is International Women’s Day. I write posts for the DSI blog, so in late February, I started brainstorming ideas for a post on disabled women. I am a disabled woman with an international perspective, but I confess I got stuck. Share stories of successful disabled women? Important, yes, and true, but how to avoid objectification? Statistics about the current state of disabled women around the world? Honestly, too depressing. Books by disabled women? Always fun - perhaps too easy for a book nerd like me… 

And so on. The only thing I was sure of is that I didn’t want to write another post about Helen Keller. She was great, of course, though a much more complex and human person than most people realize (did you know she was a card-carrying Socialist?); she’s just so ubiquitous. Probably the best-known disabled person, Keller has been held up as a role model - at times a frustrating one - for disabled and nondisabled people alike. 

In The Radical Lives of Helen Keller, Kim E. Nielsen presents a nuanced portrait of Keller, reminding readers that though most of us are familiar with Anne Sullivan’s breakthrough moment finger-spelling “water” to young Keller, many details of her adult life are less well-known. Nielsen describes Keller as “an advocate of female suffrage, a defender of the radical industrial workers of the world, and a supporter of birth control and the unemployed.” A graduate of Radcliffe, keenly aware of and interested in the world around her, Keller found no traditional paths to employment and supported herself by writing, lecture tours, fundraising efforts, and the philanthropy of others. None of this, it must be said, made life easy or predictable.

There is much to admire. But some of Keller’s positions are problematic. She never learned American Sign Language, relying entirely on finger spelling. Her decision was influenced by her close friendship with Alexander Graham Bell, who opposed anything that he interpreted as separating “the deaf” from “the hearing.” The concept of the Deaf (capital D) community would have appalled him. Keller, who was both blind and deaf, allied herself almost exclusively with blind-centered initiatives.

Perhaps as a result, it is to people on the blindness spectrum that Keller is trotted out as the example of all that can be accomplished with determination and cheerfulness. Anyone who has ever been instructed to smile on a day when every little thing has gone wrong, from burning the toast to stepping in a puddle, can imagine how irritating this line of reasoning is. That’s why, in Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller, Georgina Kleege expresses her frustration with the myth of Helen Keller, telling her, “Your life story inscribes the idea that disability is a personal tragedy to be overcome through an individual’s fortitude and pluck, rather than a set of cultural practices and assumptions affecting many individuals that could be changed through collective action.” Indeed, all the fortitude and pluck in the world won’t help a blind person access a website that hasn’t been properly coded for assistive technology to read aloud what’s on the screen.

Even with all this complexity, what more is there to say about Helen Keller? Well, despite my determination to leave her ghost alone, here I am, writing about her. I’m writing about her because of one of my students. I teach at the university level, and I’ve listened to and participated in conversations about reading lists - de-colonizing the syllabus to include people of color, “queering” the syllabus to include LGBTQ+ voices, and adding more women to the syllabus. None of these well-meaning and caring professors suggested adding disabled authors.

In my fall 2025 English class, during a unit on literacy narratives, I asked my students to read a couple chapters from Keller’s The Story of My Life; I admit, the chapters included the famous scene at the water pump, but also what happened after that - how Keller expanded her vocabulary and wrestled with concepts that, unlike water, she could not touch. My students are in Afghanistan, and most of them had never heard of Keller. I gave them a brief summary of her life before we read the chapters and left it at that. When we read the chapters, we didn’t talk about Keller as an inspiring disabled girl; we discussed her within the context of literacy, focusing on the way she acquired the ability to read and communicate. While her method was different from the other writers we read, the philosophy was the same: reading, writing, and language shape the way we understand and interact with the world.

Near the end of the semester, one of my students casually mentioned that he had been intrigued by Keller’s story and done some research on his own. He reported with amazement the absurd theory that Keller did not exist. Why, he wanted to know, would anyone say that? She was so smart and amazing.

Without meaning to, he answered his own question. Keller was smart and amazing. If we were to believe this (as we should), the logical next step is that disabled people, with support and opportunity, are capable of smart and amazing accomplishments. And if that is true, society would have to start providing support and opportunities. Society, alas, tends to be a bit lazy when it comes to these sorts of things.

We hear a lot about micro-aggressions, which I try to counter with micro-advocacy. By including Keller in my course reading, I introduced a perspective few of my students had known about. At least one student went on to learn more. Another student said in class that disabled people in Afghanistan aren’t always treated well. Honestly, if the only thing my students take from that class is that disabled people are not objects of pity and despair, I will be content.

On this International Women’s Day - and every day - find a way to advocate for disabled people, and especially for disabled women, who are usually at a greater disadvantage than disabled men. If you are a disabled woman, know that you are not alone. And oh, sure, go ahead and read a book about Helen Keller. Or wait till the next blog post, which will most likely be a list of books written by disabled women.

Sources:

Georgina Kleege. Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2006. Accessed via the National Library Service.

Kim E. Nielsen. The Radical Lives of Helen Keller. New York University Press, 2004. Accessed via the National Library Service.