Keller's social views provoked considerable resistance--Andrew Carnegie said that she needed a spanking--from an admiring public that saw in her a cathartic mixture of vulnerable womanhood and Victorian purity. Her activism extended to a wide array of reform movements. Her work on behalf of the deaf-blind and the blind involved pioneering efforts in prevention, and she sought to transform the already handicapped into working, productive citizens. With the exception of her opposition to Adolf Hitler during World War II, Keller was a lifelong pacifist and a courageous critic of war. Most controversially, she publicly affiliated with the Socialist Party and identified herself with the attempts of the movement to check the exploitative practices of big business in the early twentieth century. One of the linchpins holding these concerns together was her support for women's suffrage, the participation of women being critical, she believed, to the reform of a militant capitalist society. Both during her life and since her death, the cult of Helen Keller "the plaster saint," as she called it, has largely ignored her allegiance to the cause of radical social reform.
Helen Adams Keller was born on 27 June 1880 in Tuscumbia, a small town on the Tennessee River in northwest Alabama.
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