The Woman in the Teacher: A Biography of Anne Sullivan Macy

FAIN: FT-53008-05

Kim Evangel Nielsen
University of Wisconsin, Green Bay (Green Bay, WI 54311-7003)

Though widely known as the worker of educational miracles in the life of the deaf-blind child Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan Macy remains an obscured historical figure. With this funding I intend to complete research and begin drafting a book-length biographical study of the famed educator. The increasingly extensive integration of people with disabilities into education, the workplace, and the public world make this project significant. Themes to be examined include Macy’s life-long efforts to shape her life, her complex relationship to her own disability, her educational methods, the professional opportunities available to women of her class and generation, and the vital relationship between the student Helen Keller and teacher Anne Sullivan Macy.

Associated Products

Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (Book)
Title: Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller
Author: Kim Nielsen
Abstract: The first biography to unearth the fascinating relationship between Anne Sullivan Macy and Helen Keller After many years, historian and Helen Keller expert Kim Nielsen realized that she, along with other historians and biographers, had failed Anne Sullivan Macy. While Macy is remembered primarily as Helen Keller's teacher and mythologized as a straightforward educational superhero, the real story of this brilliant, complex, and misunderstood woman, who described herself as a "badly constructed human being," has never been completely told. Beyond the Miracle Worker, the first biography of Macy in nearly fifty years, complicates the typical Helen-Annie "feel good" narrative in surprising ways. By telling the life from Macy's perspective-not Keller's-the biography is the first to put Macy squarely at the center of the story. It presents a new and fascinating tale about a wounded but determined woman and her quest for a successful, meaningful life. Born in 1866 to poverty-stricken Irish immigrants, the parentless and deserted Macy suffered part of her childhood in the Massachusetts State Almshouse at Tewksbury. Seeking escape, in love with literature, and profoundly stubborn, she successfully fought to gain an education at the Perkins School for the Blind. As an adult, Macy taught Keller, helping the girl realize her immense potential, and Macy's intimate friendship with Keller remained powerful throughout their lives. Yet as Macy floundered with her own blindness, ill health, and depression, as well as a tumultuous and triangulated marriage, she came to lean on her former student, emotionally, physically, and economically. Based on privately held primary source material, including materials at both the American Foundation for the Blind and the Perkins School for the Blind, Beyond the Miracle Worker is revelatory and absorbing, unraveling one of the best known-and least understood-friendships of the twentieth century.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2048
Publisher: Beacon Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780807050460

- “The Southern Ties of Helen Keller,” Journal of Southern History LXXIII, No. 4 (November 2007): 783-806. (Article)
Title: - “The Southern Ties of Helen Keller,” Journal of Southern History LXXIII, No. 4 (November 2007): 783-806.
Author: Kim E Nielsen
Abstract: This article discusses the Southern roots of author Helen Keller, who lived in Tuscumbia, Alabama and, the author argues, was shaped by her identity as a Caucasian disabled southern woman. The family's struggle to educate and understand Helen are discussed as is the employment of Anne Sullivan to be Keller's teacher and the resulting culture shock. Keller's support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and her troubles with her family are discussed..
Year: 2007
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Southern History
Publisher: Southern Historical Association

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