| Collection |
WSJHS |
| Description |
Helen Keller hand made portrait doll. Helen is depicted as a young woman. Her head and hair are hand painted. The hair is worn in a bun. She is holding her hands in from of her face. Helen wears a cotton printed dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves. It is made of blue, turquoise and green floral print with lace on the high neck and a 2.5" lace trim flounce. The dress has a wide band at the waist made of turquoise velveteen and trimmed on the lower portion with a blue and green floral braid. The white cotton petticoat and pantaloons are trimmed in what appears to a matching tatted lace. She is wearing tan colored stockings and brown leather shoes. Her feet are attached to a wooden stand with small nails.
These dolls were used in an educational program by the B'nai B'rith called the Dolls for Democracy. Women in the U.S.A. and Canada use the dolls in schools and other groups to teach about tolerance.
Helen Keller (1880-1968) was an American author and educator who was blind and deaf. Keller was afflicted at the age of 19 months with an illness that left her blind, deaf, and mute. She was examined by Alexander Graham Bell at the age of six; as a result he sent to her a remarkable 20-year-old teacher, Anne Sullivan from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston who remained with Keller for the next 50 years. Within months Keller had learned to feel objects and associate them with words spelled out by finger signals on her palm, to read sentences by feeling raised words on cardboard, and to make her own sentences by arranging words in a frame. She learned to read Braille and then she began a slow process of learning to speak. She also learned to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker while the words were simultaneously spelled out for her. At age 14 she enrolled in the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City, and at 16 she entered the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts. She won admission to Radcliffe College in 1900 and graduated cum laude in 1904. Having developed skills never approached by any similarly disabled person, Keller began to write of blindness, a subject then taboo in women's magazines because of the relationship of many cases to venereal disease. She wrote of her life in several books and in 1913 she began lecturing, primarily on behalf of the American Foundation for the Blind, for which she later established a $2 million endowment fund. Her efforts to improve treatment of the deaf and the blind were influential in removing the disabled from asylums. She also prompted the organization of commissions for the blind in 30 states by 1937. Keller's education and training represent an extraordinary accomplishment in the education of persons with disabilities.
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| Object Name |
Dolls, portrait |
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