My Mother

Helen Keller (1880–1968)
From Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings

Interesting Links

Video: Helen Keller with Mother & Brother, from the 1919 film Deliverance (YouTube)

Online exhibit: “Anne Sullivan as Teacher, 1886–1904” (American Foundation of the Blind)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “My Future As I See It,” Helen Keller
• “The Unnatural Mother,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• “The Empress’s Ring,” Nancy Hale

Buy the book
Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $28.50

“Miss Keller’s mother, Miss Sullivan (Mrs. Macy), Miss Keller.” Photograph by the Gerhard Sisters, St. Louis, 1914, reproduced in Helen Keller’s memoir Midstream (1929).
    A year or two after this photography session, Emme Gerhard wrote: “While being photographed Miss Keller was an ideal subject, radiating spiritually, which is absolutely necessary in order to reproduce the mind, life or soul. Without this—in other words, with merely flesh and bone—a picture is dead. She responded so quickly to thought as to convince us that when material senses were taken from her she developed the spiritual, which is far greater. . . .
    “Mrs. Keller, Helen's mother (the name ‘Mother’ would imply all we could say of her) is a sweet, kind motherly looking woman. . . . Thankfulness and resignation were written on her brow.”

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During the course of her life, Helen Keller met and befriended countless world leaders, politicians, actors, writers, and other famous celebrities. It is perhaps fitting, then, that her education occurred in no small part because of the world’s most famous English-language author of the nineteenth century, who died fifteen years before she was born. As she explains in The Story of My Life:

My mother’s only ray of hope came from Charles Dickens’s “American Notes.” She had read his account of Laura Bridgman, and remembered vaguely that she was deaf and blind, yet had been educated. But she also remembered with a hopeless pang that Dr. Howe, who had discovered the way to teach the deaf and blind, had been dead many years. His methods had probably died with him; and if they had not, how was a little girl in a far-off town in Alabama to receive the benefit of them?

At the age of six, Keller was a “wild, uncouth little creature” (according to one account she herself would later quote) and the means of raising, much less educating her were beyond the abilities of her parents. By the time Helen was six, Mrs. Keller had another daughter to raise, and the attention demanded by Helen distressed her. (“Fate ambushed the joy in my heart when I was twenty-four and left it dead,” she told a friend in a weak moment.) Many of her family members insisted that Helen should be institutionalized; her mother’s brother, Uncle Fred, even banned Helen from visiting her grandmother in Memphis.

Yet Kate Keller refused to acquiesce to these demands. During the summer of 1886, Helen visited a Baltimore oculist with her parents, and he referred them to Alexander Graham Bell in Washington, DC, who in turn recommended them to the Perkins School for the Blind—the very institution that had been home to both Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and Laura Bridgman. In March 1887, Anne Sullivan was dispatched from the Perkins School to the Keller home. Sullivan had in fact shared a cottage with Bridgman for six years. She read Dr. Howe’s reports and the old files on her housemate’s childhood in preparation for her new post. “The morning after my teacher came,” Keller wrote, “she led me into her room and gave me a doll. The little blind children at the Perkins Institution had sent it and Laura Bridgman had dressed it; but I did not know this until afterward.”

Unsurprisingly, as Keller’s behavior improved and her education advanced, there were occasional moments of strife and competition between the Kellers and Sullivan, but Helen’s teacher ultimately earned the complete confidence of both Helen and her parents. The final showdown came in 1897, when Helen was seventeen. Arthur Gilman, the headmaster of the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Helen was preparing herself for college, believed that Sullivan had too much power over Helen and disagreed with the plans for her student’s education. Claiming that Helen was being overworked to the detriment of her health and accusing Sullivan of cruelty and even of mental instability, he and some of his colleagues sent a barrage of letters to Kate Keller, with the goals of separating Anne and Helen and of assigning legal guardianship to him. Since Helen’s father had died the previous year, Mrs. Keller was faced for the first time with making a major decision concerning Helen without his advice and, alarmed by the letters, she sent her approval to Gilman. As Kim E. Nielsen points out in her biography of Sullivan, Gilman’s guardianship could have rendered Helen non compos mentis—unable to manage her own finances and property or to make legal decisions—although it’s not clear whether Gilman’s intentions were so nefarious.

When Kate Keller heard next from Sullivan, she realized her mistake and hurriedly responded, “I always think of Helen as partly your child and whilst in this I think first of her I think of you too, and utter ruin to the life you have striven so patiently to develop and round out. That I would support anyone rather than you is not a tenable position because I have always loved and trusted you. . . .” Mrs. Keller immediately traveled from Alabama to the school, found Helen “in perfect physical condition,” and met with several of Sullivan’s supporters, including Helen’s sister Mildred, who was also enrolled at the school. She then helped Sullivan remove Helen from the school to continue her education with private tutors. When Helen was asked what her own preference would be, she responded, “I will go with Teacher. She has meant more to me than my mother has. She has made me everything that I am.”

Anne Sullivan became the permanent companion to and mentor of Helen Keller. They would often be visited by Helen’s mother over the next quarter century, and during the summer of 1921 she stayed with them, after recovering from an unspecified illness, in their home in Forest Hills, in Queens, New York. Kate Keller died that November, and Helen recalled in a letter to Mildred the last memory of her mother:

Just as she was leaving me at the station in New York, she said suddenly, “Helen, you will not see me again, but whatever happens, I shall wait for you.” Afterwards she wrote, “Do not let your feelings or nerves spoil your work, always do the best you can, and think of mother watching until you come.” I am sure, sister, she is much closer to us now than ever, and her dear spirit will give us comfort as time passes.

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Notes: The letters of Jane Carlyle, wife of the writer Thomas Carlyle, were first collected after her death in The Early Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1889). Sydney Smith was an Anglican minister and a noted wit in the early nineteenth century. D. H. Lawrence’s books published during Kate Keller’s lifetime include Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920). The poem paraphrased by Mrs. Keller is Sidney Lanier’s “A Song of the Future” (1878).

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs

My Mother

It was while I was in vaudeville that the first bereavement came which struck at the very roots of my life. My mother died while we were appearing in Los Angeles. My father’s death, which occurred while I was a young girl sixteen years old, never seemed so real to me. But I had had my mother all those years and fine ligaments of love and sympathy had knit us together.

I have no vivid recollections of her before my education began. I have a dim sensation of arms about me, and hands that wiped away my tears; but such memories are too vague to bring before me a picture of her.

She used to tell me how happy she was when I was born. She dwelt on her memories of the eighteen months when I could see and hear. She told me how, as soon as I could walk, I chased sunbeams and butterflies, how I held out my little hands to pet every creature I saw and was never afraid. “And what wonderful eyes you had!” she would say, “you were always picking up needles and buttons which no one else could find.” She had a pretty workbasket which stood on three slender legs, quite high above the floor. It had holes all round near the top. She loved to tell how I would come to her knees and lisp something which she interpreted to mean, “I wonder when I shall be tall enough to look through those holes and see what is in the basket.” She also remembered my delight in the open wood fire, and told how I insisted upon sitting up late watching the sparks and laughing as they danced up the chimney. “Yes, life was good to us both for a few brief months,” she would say wistfully. Then when she was twenty-three came the illness which left me deaf and blind, and after that life was never the same to her. It was as if a white winter had swept over the June of her youth; I know, although she never said it, that she suffered more through me than through her other children. Her nature was not expansive or happy. She made few close friends, and wherever she sojourned, the sorrow and loneliness of her spirit persisted. The larger opportunities for enjoyment and intellectual enrichment which she gained on her journeys with us or her visits in our home at Wrentham did not erase from her heart the sense of tragedy and denial which my limitations kept always before her. That her suffering was crushed into silence did not lessen its intensity. But there was nothing selfish in her sorrow. What she had suffered broadened and deepened her sympathy for others.

She never talked about herself. She was sensitive even to the point of pain, and shy of revealing herself even to her children. But, veiled as her personality was, she was always an intimate part of our lives. It was inexpressibly sweet the way she said to me that her last thought at night and her first thought in the morning was of me. She suffered much from rheumatism in her hands, and she found it most difficult to write in braille, which disappointed her keenly because she never liked to have anyone read her letters to me.

It is a comfort to me to believe that all she hoped and prayed for was fulfilled in her second child, my lovely sister Mildred. Five years after her birth came my brother Phillips, who bears the name of one of my earliest and dearest friends, Phillips Brooks. When my father died, my mother devoted herself to the bringing up of her two younger children. (I was away from home most of the time, in New York and Boston.) Then Mildred married Warren L. Tyson of Montgomery, Alabama, and my mother spent the later years of her life partly with them and with me.

By temperament my mother was not domestic; but after she married my father, she had a large Southern household to manage. She carried the whole burden of housekeeping, supervision of negro workers, gardening, looking after the poultry, preparing hams and lard, sewing for the children, and entertaining the guests whom my father brought home to dinner almost every day. She was an expert in the science of poultry-raising. Her hams were praised all the country round; her jellies and preserves were the envy of our neighbours. She went about these homely tasks silent, unutterably sad, with me clinging to her skirts. Tall and stately as Juno, she stood beside the great iron kettles, directing the negroes in all the processes of making lard. My teacher often wondered how such a sensitive, high-strung woman could endure this sort of work; but my mother never complained. She threw herself into these tasks as if she had no other interest in life. Whatever the problem, whether in the house, the chicken yard or out on the farm, for the time being she gave her whole mind to it. She said to Miss Sullivan once, “Of course lard-making hasn’t the charm of sculpture or architecture or poetry; but I suppose it has its importance in the universal scheme of things.”

She was passionately devoted to her gardening and to her flowers. Nothing delighted her more than to nurse a plant weakling into strength and bloom. The wealth of her heart had to spend itself even upon the most unworthy of nature’s children. One early spring morning she went out to look at some young rose bushes which she had set out some time before, thinking that the warm days were surely coming. She found that a heavy frost had killed them, and she wrote me that very morning that “like David when his son died, she lifted up her voice and wept.”

Her love of birds was equal to her love of flowers. She would spend hours in the little wood near our house in Wrentham watching their pretty antics when they made love, or built their nests, or fed the young birds and taught them to fly. The mocking bird and the thrush were the darlings of her heart.

My mother talked intelligently, brilliantly, about current events, and she had a Southerner’s interest in politics. But after my mind took a radical turn she could never get over the feeling that we had drifted apart. It grieves me that I should have added to the sadness that weighed upon her, but I have the consolation of remembering that no differences could take away from us the delight of talking together.

She was an omnivorous reader. She welcomed all books new or old, in the English of Chaucer or the English of Ruskin. She had a horror of mediocrity and hypocrisy. I remember the scorn in her words as she quoted some bromide that was pronounced by a dull celebrity. In keenness of wit she resembled Mrs. Carlyle, whose letters she read with pleasure. Mr. Macy introduced her to Sydney Smith, and she used to say that his sayings were a silent accompaniment to her thoughts. Boswell’s Johnson also gave her many bright moments. Bernard Shaw irritated her, not because he was radical or sarcastic, but because he was a chronic iconoclast. She had no patience with Lawrence’s books. She would exclaim, “He seems incapable of conceiving purity and innocence in a woman. To him love is indecent. No modest violets grow in the fields of life for him.”

But in the presence of true genius her humility was complete. Walt Whitman did not shock her. She knew several of Balzac’s books almost by heart. She read Rabelais, Montesquieu, and Montaigne. When she read Lanier she said “his ‘gray and sober dove,’ with the eye of faith and the wing of love, nestled in her bosom.”

One memorable summer we rented a cottage on Lake St. Catherine, in Vermont. How we all enjoyed the lovely lake, the pine-covered hills, and the winding green alleys they call roads in Vermont! I have a mental picture of her which I treasure, seated on the little porch which overlooked the lake, in the evening, her dear hands idle for a few minutes, while she watched the children and young people in boats and canoes, with a tender, wistful expression on her beautiful face as the sun disappeared behind the green hills.

When the World War burst upon us she refused to talk about it, and when she saw the thousands of young men who were encamped round about Montgomery, her heart yearned to shield them from the horrors which awaited them. When Russia offered her splendid peace terms to the Allies, my mother said she wanted to stretch her arms across the ocean and embrace the one country which had the courage and the generosity to call war a crime against humanity.

Her death came as she had always prayed it would, swiftly, before she was old and dependent. She had dreaded illness and the slow parting scenes that usually precede death, and she desired that she might die in her sleep, or suddenly. So it was according to her wish that the end came. She was with her dear ones in Montgomery, but no one saw her die.

I received the telegram telling of her death two hours before I had to go on the stage. I had not even known she was ill. Every fibre of my being cried out at the thought of facing the audience, but it had to be done. Fortunately, they did not know what I was suffering, and that made it a little easier for my teacher and me. One of the questions asked me that day was, “How old are you?” How old, indeed! I felt as old as time, and I answered, “How old do I look?” The people laughed, pleased that I had evaded telling my age, which they supposed would have been embarrassing to me. Another question was, “Are you happy?” I swallowed hard and answered: “Yes, because I have confidence in God.” Then it was over, and for a little while I could sit alone with my sorrow. I had absolute faith that we should meet again in the Land of Eternal Beauty; but oh, the dreary blank her going left in my life! I missed her everywhere I went over the road she had travelled with me. I missed her braille letters, and she seemed to have died a second time when I visited my sister in Montgomery the following April. The only thought that upheld me was that in the Great Beyond where all truth shines revealed she would find in my limitations a satisfying sense of God’s purpose of good which runs like a thread of gold through all things.

First published in Midstream: My Later Life (1929).

My Future As I See It

Helen Keller (1880–1968)
From Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings

Interesting Links

Helen Keller timeline (Perkins School for the Blind)

“Helen Keller’s Bookshelf” (Dorothy Herrmann, American Experience)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “I Go Adventuring,” Helen Keller
• “My Country,” Mary Antin
• “Carlotta, the Lady Aeronaut,” Mary H. Myers
• “Mon Amie,” Randolph Bourne

Buy the book
Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings
List price: $40.00
Web store price: $28.50

Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan, and Keller’s dog Sir Thomas (“Phiz”)—a black-and-white Boston bull terrier—sitting in the branches of a tree, probably in their backyard in Wrentham, Massachusetts, around 1904. With one hand Keller reads Sullivan’s lips; with the other she touches a book Sullivan holds open. Both women are in white dresses, Sullivan’s embroidered with flowers. A lawn stretches far into the distance behind them. Courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind Archives, Watertown, MA.

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“It is heresy in our time to intimate that a young woman may do better than go to college,” twenty-four-year-old Helen Keller wrote the year after she graduated from Radcliffe College. “Five years ago I had to decide whether I should be a heretic, or adhere to the ancient faith that it is the woman’s part to lay her hands to the spindle and to hold the distaff. Some of my friends were enthusiastic about the advantages of a college education, and the special honor it would be for me to compete with my fellows who see and hear.”

She had entered Radcliffe in the fall of 1900; Anne Sullivan, her governess and teacher since Keller was six years old, accompanied her to classes and spelled out the lectures into her hand. For both the entrance exams and for subsequent tests, Sullivan was not present; the dean arranged for two proctors for each exam: “one to proctor Helen, and another to proctor Helen’s proctor,” one of the former recounted years later. “She had her typewriter for work in answering the exam questions. I had my Braille typewriter to translate the questions.”

For her studies at Radcliffe, Keller relied on two assistive devices: a braille machine and a typewriter. Using the former, she was able to read and revise her writing without help; but she found the machine “somewhat cumbersome.” She was much faster and quite accurate at the typewriter, but then necessarily depended on Sullivan and others to notice typographical errors and, if she wanted to revise, to spell out her work back to her. On top of the challenges presented by her studies and her exams, Keller signed a $3,000 contract to write her life story for The Ladies’ Home Journal. Her English literature professor, Charles Townsend Copeland, encouraged the proposal and allowed her to submit her work-in-progress in lieu of regular assignments. For the most part, she composed the essays of the magazine version of “The Story of My Life” on her typewriter. “Under great pressure” to meet her publisher’s deadlines, in July 1902 Keller finished the last chapter of her story, which had already begun to appear in print as a serial in the magazine.

She also enlisted the assistance of John Macy, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard instructor who lived in their boardinghouse; he learned to finger-spell and with Sullivan helped to arrange and submit Keller’s manuscripts. Macy negotiated a contract with Doubleday, Page to gather the installments into a book. William Wade, a friend who had previously arranged to make braille editions of some of Keller’s college textbooks, had a braille copy of each article prepared from the magazine proofs. When she read through the entire series, Keller decided to rewrite it substantially; Sullivan and Macy played an essential role in this process, not only offering practical help in assembling a finished typescript but also making “suggestions at many points” about Keller’s prose.

The Story of My Life was published in March 1903 and was widely and favorably reviewed, although its initial sales were modest. There were a handful of naysayers who questioned the authenticity of the book, but one review apparently caused the most consternation to Keller, as well as to Sullivan and Macy. “All her knowledge is hearsay knowledge,” wrote an unnamed critic in The Nation, “her very sensations are for the most part vicarious, and yet she writes of things beyond her power of perception with the assurance of one who has verified every word.” The writer chided her for describing things she “saw” or “heard” when she could have done neither and seemed less interested in Keller’s experiences or accomplishments and more interested in her as an object for scientific study: “We lose what she could teach us by showing wherein she varies from the normal. It almost seems as it every fact of real psychological value has been perversely withheld. . . . Some accurate observations of the manner in which the senses of touch and smell can play substitute to the missing ones would be of real scientific value.”

In response, Keller tackled the issue of language and experience in her next book, The World I Live In:

It is not a convention of language, but a forcible feeling of the reality, that at times makes me start when I say, “Oh, I see my mistake!” or “How dark, cheerless is his life!” I know these are metaphors. Still, I must prove with them, since there is nothing in our language to replace them. Deaf-blind metaphors to correspond do not exist and are not necessary. Because I can understand the word “reflect” figuratively, a mirror has never perplexed me.

As an example, she flags the following sentence in her book: “When I was a little girl I was taken to see a woman who was blind and paralyzed.” In a footnote, she adds, “The excellent proof-reader has put a query to my use of the word ‘see.’ If I had said visit,” he would have asked no questions, yet what does ‘visit’ mean but ‘see’ (visitare)?” Georgina Kleege, author of Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller, comments, “Keller uses her knowledge of Latin to demonstrate that the more one knows about language the harder it is to find vocabulary that does not have some etymological link to sight and hearing. To deny her the use of such language, she argues, would be to deprive her of the ability to communicate at all.”

Keller hoped The World I Live In would sate the public appetite for her life story (it did not) and allow her to write on other subjects. “It is startling to observe how five years after publishing what is still probably the best-known disability autobiography,” Keege concludes, “Keller writes a book that chafes at the shortcomings of the genre she helped to invent, exposes the limitations of the language that is her chosen medium, and experiments with a new approach to self-representation that was well in advance of her time.”

Before Keller went to Radcliffe, Anne Sullivan had pondered publishing her own biographical account of their experiences. “The Story of My Life is a radically different book from what Sullivan originally had in mind, even based on just the little bit known about her unrealized plans,” writes Kim E. Nielsen, who edited the just-published Library of America edition. “In her imagined book she would have been the primary actor, the focal point from which the story was told. The Story of My Life tells the story from Keller's vantage point as Keller's story with Keller as the authorial voice.” Moreover, for the last century most readers, especially students, have read not the full, collaborative book but only the autobiographical narrative written by Keller herself. The original “unabridged” edition was more than three times the length; two additional sections included a selection of Keller’s letters from 1887 to 1901 and a “Supplementary Account of Her Education,” written by Macy, that draws liberally on Sullivan’s letters and reports. Although Doubleday, Page reprinted the original edition on at least seventeen occasions through 1949, most of the dozens of editions produced by other publishers, from the 1928 “school edition” issued by Houghton Mifflin to the 1967 Scholastic edition to the 1996 Dover edition, present only the first third of the book (often abridged or even rewritten) and omit the other two sections.

In 1905, Doubleday, Page published a “special edition” of the full book, with two additional chapters appended as Part IV. The first of these new entries would become, in 1908, the opening chapter of The World I Live In. The second, “My Future As I See It,” appeared in the November 1903 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal as a postscript to “The Story of My Life.” Written when Keller was a senior at Radcliffe, the essay was removed from all future printings and editions of the book, but it has been reprinted in the LOA edition, and we present it below. In a headnote for the magazine version, the editor wrote, “Exactly what Miss Keller intends to take up as her life-work after she has graduated is practically the only point about herself which she has not fully explained in her book. Hence it was suggested to Miss Keller that she elucidate this oft-asked question.”

The descriptions above of Helen Keller’s methods of compositions and the textual history of The Story of My Life are adapted from the Note on the Texts in Helen Keller: Autobiographies & Other Writings, edited by Kim E. Nielsen. The account by one of Keller’s proctors appeared in the August 1968 issue of The Radcliffe Quarterly and was quoted in Dorothy Herrmann’s biography of Keller.

Notes: The peasant girl who spilled her milk is a reference to La Fontaine’s “La laitière et le pot au lait” (“The Milkmaid and Her Pail”), from his Fables (1668–94). Andrew Carnegie was a steel industry magnate who gave away most of his wealth during the last two decades of his life, funding about three thousand public libraries, as well as dozens of colleges, museums, and foundations. In 1910 he offered Keller a pension to support herself and her work; she at first declined but “anxious about those who are nearest to me” she accepted his offer three years later.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs

My Future As I See It

When I wrote “The Story of My Life” I thought I had told my readers all I knew about myself. But since the publication of my book I have been asked what I am going to do after I graduate from Radcliffe this year. People often ask me what my future is as I see it. I do not intend to follow the example of the peasant girl in La Fontaine, who pictured such a bright future that in her enthusiasm she spilled her milk. Nor am I like the small boys who vie with each other in predicting what they will do when they grow up, and promise to be police­men, doctors, firemen, and soldiers.

I used to have all sorts of unrealizable ambitions. Indeed, the only one that has never troubled me is the ambition to be President of the United States. I suppose in youth we are all, as a matter of course, song-birds. The only question of importance which we have to decide is what kind of song-bird we shall be. As we grow older we smile at the eager soarings of our childhood. But I hope we shall never cease to dream out our world, to people it with gods strong of hand and great of soul. I certainly hope I shall never think of the world as the pessimist thinks of it—a commonplace thing shaped like an orange, slightly flattened at the ends!

The only real ambitions spring from the circumstances in which our lives are set. I used to believe that my limitations would prevent me from doing anything beyond improving my mind and accepting the cup of pleasure or sorrow in whatever measure it might be dealt to me. There is no grief deeper than the consciousness that we are isolated, no ache of heart harder to bear than the thought that our fellows are crying in the darkness, and we are so fettered that we may not go to them. This is separation from the social order into which we are born, the agony of thwarted forces, a death in the midst of life. But I have discovered that the material with which we work is every­where and in abundance. I have felt the joy of the strong man who grasps the reins in his hands and drives the forces that would master him. Our worst foes are not belligerent circumstances, but wavering spirits. As a man thinketh, so is he. The field in which I may work is narrow, but it stretches before me limitless. I am like the philosopher whose garden was small but reached up to the stars.

The occupations I can engage in are few, but into each one I can throw my whole strength. Opportunities to be of service to others offer themselves constantly, and every day, every hour, calls even on me for a timely word or action. It bewilders me to think of the countless tasks that may be mine. I am near the end of my last year at college. I am already looking forward to Commencement Day. In imagination I have passed my last examinations, I have written my last thesis, I have said good-by to my school-days, and taken my little canoe and ventured out on unknown seas. I have received the best education my country can give me. Generous friends have assisted me and strewn my path with opportunities. The question now is, What shall I do with this education and these opportunities?

I shall not forget the continuous task which my friends keep before me of improving my mind. I shall try to keep my flower-beds well trimmed and perhaps I may add to my estate. I shall read as extensively as possible and, perhaps, increase my knowledge of the classics. I shall never lose my interest in history and social questions, and I shall continue the studies that please me most as long as I live.

I am much interested in work that woman may do in the world. It is a fine thing to be an American, it is a splendid thing to be an American woman. Never in the history of the world has woman held a position of such dignity, honor, and usefulness as here and now. We read how nation after nation has reached a certain height of civilization and failed because the women of the nation remained uncivilized. I think the degree of a nation’s civilization may be measured by the degree of enlightenment of its women. So I shall study the economic questions relating to woman and do my best to further her advancement; for God and His world are for everybody.

Above all must I interest myself in affairs which concern the deaf and the blind. Their needs have given me another motive for traveling. I used to idle away hours in dreams of sailing on the Rhine, climbing the Alps, and wandering amid the monuments of Greece and Rome. Every tale I read about travelers, every description that friends gave me of their experiences abroad, and especially my visit to the World’s Fair at Chicago, added fire to my longing. But now I have another ambition which transcends those imagined pleasures. Travel would, it seems to me, afford valuable opportunities to act as a sort of emissary from the teachers in this country to those of Europe, and to carry a message of encouragement to those who, in face of popular prejudice and indifference, as in Italy and Sweden, are struggling to teach the blind and give them means of self-support.

There are two ways in which we may work: with our own hands and through our fellow men. Both ways are open to me. With my own hands and voice I can teach; perhaps I can write. Through others I can do good by speaking in favor of beneficent work and by speaking against what seems to me wrong.

I often think I shall live in the country and take into my home a deaf child and teach him as Miss Sullivan has taught me. For years I have observed the details of her method, and her example in word and deed has inspired me so that I feel that I could impart to a child afflicted like myself the power to see with the soul and understand with the heart. All his needs and difficulties would be intelligible to me, since I know the darkness he sees and the stillness he hears. The road he must travel I have traveled; I know where the rough places are and how to help him over them. This would be the directest and most joyous way of doing for another what has been done for me.

Whether I teach or not, I shall write. My subject-matter is limited. I have very little that is novel or entertaining to tell those who see and hear, who have a vision that embraces earth and sky and water, whereas I grasp only so much of the world as I can hold in my hand. But I may perhaps translate from the classics and from the modern languages. If opportunity offers, I shall certainly write on topics connected with the deaf and the blind. If I see a plan on foot to place the blind in positions of self-support, I will advocate it. If there is a good cause that needs a word, I will speak it if I can. If an institution is projected for the relief of suffering, and money is needed, I will write a timely appeal. Editors and publishers have already suggested subjects on which I might write, and I find their proposals helpful because they afford a clue to what others expect of me, and indicate the various ways in which I may increase and apply what literary skill I may have. I cannot say, however, to what extent I shall follow those suggestions.

Another way in which I may render service to others with my own hands is to take up settlement work. I suppose, as a friend said, I was fighting with windmills when I said in my story that it seemed wicked that the poor could not live in comfortable homes and grow strong and beautiful. But I hear every day of young girls who leave their homes and pleasures to dwell among the poor and brighten and dignify their lives, and the impulse within me to follow their example seems at times too strong for me to restrain. The world is full of suffering, it is true, but full, also, of the overcoming of it. As I reflect on the enormous amount of good work that is left undone, I cannot but say a word and look my disapproval when I hear that my country is spending millions upon millions of dollars for war and war engines—more, I have heard, than twice as much as the entire public-school system of the United States costs us.

I could help take care of the sick. I have several times had occasion to use my hands to lessen pain, as they do in massage. I may study this art by-and-by, and even if I do not become a masseuse I shall be interested in it as an employment for the blind. Our hands are instruments with which to gain a livelihood, and if they are trained to the best advantage they prove more precious than the eye or the ear. Massage is an occupation in which I or any blind person may use the hands with profit and pleasure and bring comfort to many.

No work, however, can mean so much to me as what I can do for the deaf and the blind. I am not competent now to discuss their problems, but I shall find out what those problems are and study the methods of solving them. Whatever I do I shall keep track of all the measures proposed in behalf of the deaf and the blind, and to the best of my ability support the most efficient. I realize how much has already been done toward improving the condition of the blind and the deaf, and I am grateful; but there still remains much to be done; do what we may, we fall short and leave the work incomplete. I have twice had my share in the promotion of enterprises for the relief of the defective classes.

Last winter there was a bill before the Legislature of Massachusetts to provide the blind with manual training which would enable them to earn their bread, and I was asked to speak for the bill. Again, last May I attended the dedication of the new building of the Eye and Ear Infirmary in New York, and at the request of the physicians I spoke in behalf of the hospital. If these workers and philanthropists in Massachusetts and New York thought that I, a student in college, could help hundreds of unfortunate men and women, how much greater must my chances of usefulness be when I comprehend more fully the needs of the deaf and the blind! These experiences promise others, and I must follow where the good cause leads, just as the lamp goes with the hand.

Among the problems of the blind are two to which I shall direct my attention—more books for the blind and a universal system of raised print. My views may be erroneous, and I suggest them here merely to illustrate the kind of work which lies before me.

I should like the blind in America to have a magazine of high quality and varied interest like the best periodicals published for those who see. To establish one would require much money, and the blind are poor. If they are to have a periodical, some generous friend must establish it for them. In a country where so much is done to build great libraries and provide books for those who see, I should think a Mr. Carnegie might be found who would give a magazine to us who cannot see.

I am still a college girl, and I can look forward to a golden age when all my plans shall have been realized. I can dream of that happy country of the future where no man will live at his ease while another suffers; then, indeed, shall the blind see and the deaf hear.

First published in the November 1903 issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal and reprinted with minor updates and additions in the 1905 “special edition” of The Story of My Life, which is the text presented here.