Beyond the Miracle Worker

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A moving portrait of Anne Sullivan Macy, teacher of Helen Keller—and a complex, intelligent woman worthy of her own spotlight

After many years, historian and Helen Keller expert Kim Nielsen realized that she and her peers had failed Anne Sullivan Macy. While Macy is remembered primarily as Helen Keller’s teacher and a straightforward educational superhero, the real story of this brilliant, complex, and misunderstood woman has never been completely told. Beyond the Miracle Worker seeks to correct this oversight, presenting a new tale about the wounded but determined woman and her quest for a successful, meaningful life.

Born in 1866 to poverty-stricken Irish immigrants, 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. She went on to teach Helen Keller, who became a loyal and lifelong friend. As Macy floundered with her own blindness, ill health, depression, and marital strife in her later years, she came to lean on her former student for emotional, physical, and economic support.

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.Chapter 1
Feeding Hills
 
Chapter 2
Tewksbury Almshouse
 
Chapter 3
Perkins, 1880-1885: Part One
 
Chapter 4
Perkins, 1880-1886: Part Two
 
Chapter 5
Becoming a Teacher
 
Chapter 6
Tuscumbia, 1888-1891
 
Chapter 7
The Battle for Helen, Round 1, 1891-1984
 
Chapter 8
The Battle for Helen, Round 2, 1894-1900
 
Chapter 9
Radcliffe, 1900-1904
 
Chapter 10
John, 1904-1914
 
Chapter 11
On the Road, 1914-1924
 
Chapter 12
The American Foundation for the Blind, 1924-1930
 
Chapter 13
Concluding, 1930-1936
 
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index“Kim E. Nielsen’s richly textured biography provides a more interest­ing and complex narrative of Macy’s early years and the later life that she and Keller shared…Nielsen writes about disabil­ity and America’s past as well as any scholar today, and she does so unsentimentally and with subtlety, sensitive to the nuance and ambiguity that characterize the best history and biography.”—Journal of American History 
 
A remarkable story of a vulnerable woman in a culture that allowed women neither freedom nor power. Still, somehow Anne, an almost blind orphan living in a poorhouse, managed to secure an education and carve out an independent life for herself and her student, Helen Keller. Anne Sullivan Macy is a feminist hero.—Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia and Seeking Peace

“A considerate yet equitable biography of a complex woman whose singular contributions to the burgeoning field of education for the blind have often been misjudged.”—Booklist

“Nielsen overcomes all the obstacles her recalcitrant subject throws in her path, and creates a portrait of Sullivan’s life that is complex with all its contradictions and inconsistencies.”—Georgina Kleege, Disability Studies Quarterly

“Engaging and excellently researched . . . Nielsen shows how tragic Annie’s ‘secret’ and ‘shameful’ past had been-a drama worthy of Dickens. . . . The extraordinary story of Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller is an exemplary reminder that perseverance in the face of obstacles can yield miracles.”—Sidney Callahan, America

“How remarkable it is to learn about the complicated, flesh-and-blood person behind the feisty legend at the water pump. Kim Nielsen’s biography reveals so much about one of the greatest teachers of all time, and her compassionate and honest writing made my heart go out to Annie Sullivan.”—Rachel Simon, author of Riding the Bus with My Sister

“Fascinating and beautifully crafted, Beyond the Miracle Worker reinterprets Macy’s life, challenging the mythology of her work with Helen Keller to reveal a powerful, rich, and surprising personal story. . . . Conveying the complexity and humanity of Macy and her world, this is an appealing biography for general readers and scholars alike.”—Susan Burch, author of Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II

“Rejecting hagiography, Nielsen offers a complex portrait of the woman Helen Keller called ‘Teacher.’ Especially interesting are Nielsen’s reflections on Sullivan’s own vision impairment and her lifelong struggle to support herself. It’s time we all move beyond the sentimental trope of the ‘miracle worker’ as we consider the actual predicaments of those who care for and instruct people with disabilities.”BR>—Ralph James Savarese, author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption

“Kim Nielsen’s absorbing biography of Anne Sullivan Macy not only captures the complexity of Sullivan’s character, but also offers fresh insights into her relationship with her famous pupil. Thoroughly researched, persuasive, and readable, Beyond the Miracle Worker is both a compelling story and an important contribution to women’s history and the history of the disabled.”—Elisabeth Gitter, author of The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl

“Nielsen’s engaging and comprehensive account of Annie Sullivan reveals a woman of great intellect and complexity who overcame many challenges in her own right. This book will irrevocably change what you thought you knew about the ‘Helen-Annie’ story.”—Judith Heumann, Disability Rights Advocate and former U.S. Assistant Secretary Department of Education

“A significant contribution…Nielsen has provided a learned, readable narrative of Macy, one that succeeds admirably in foregrounding a woman who, during her own life, stood in the shadow of Keller. Their relationship was complex and fluid, but nothing if not tender, and Nielsen’s careful scholarship does justice both to the intricacies and to the warmth of the friendship.” —Daniel S. Goldberg, H-Disability: An H-Net Discussion NetworkKim E. Nielsen is an award-winning educator, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities We the People stipend, a Fulbright lecturer, the author of many journal articles, and frequent public speaker. Her books include Helen Keller: Selected Writings (2005), The Radical Lives of Helen Keller(2004) and Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism and the First Red Scare (2001). She also served as an advisory editor to the forthcomingEncyclopedia of American Disability History (2009). She lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin where she is Professor of History & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.It’s temp ting to begin this book like a fairy tale. Once upon a
time a poor, blind, and orphaned child named Annie magically grew into a
happy, sighted, and successful adult woman. She became a miracle worker,
lighting the intellectual fire and imagination of the deaf-blind girl Helen
Keller at a water pump in the wilds of Alabama. We know this kind of
story. Many of our books and movies, the morality tales and parables
we tell, even the heroes we’ve created, are versions of the same inspirational
tale. The cheerful and uplifting message is that yes, you too can
conquer anything in order to do the impossible.
 
But I won’t.
 
“Any book about me,” Anne Sullivan Macy reflected near the end of
her life, “must be full of contradictions.”1 Beyond the Miracle Worker is
a book that reflects these contradictions—the contradictions of a delightful,
gloomy, charismatically fascinating, and annoying woman who
was neither blind nor sighted. Though she was born in 1866, her life
is a surprisingly contemporary tale. It is the story of a caring, fiercely
proud, and intelligent woman trying to forge meaningful human relationships
despite her own ingrained flaws and wounds. It is the story
of a woman deeply frightened of depending upon anyone else for emotional,
economic, or social sustenance.
 
And yet—in one of those contradictions that Macy warned us
about—she made one notable exception: she did not hesitate to lean
on her famous student, and later friend, Helen Keller. While the whole
world assumed that Keller’s deaf-blindness forced her to depend on
her teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, my research suggests that the reverse
more accurately characterizes their relationship of nearly fifty
years. Macy leaned on Keller, juggling her uneasy combination of emotional
vulnerability and a fierce desire for independence. Her lifelong
struggle with chronic illness and depression was far more debilitating
than Keller’s deaf-blindness. Keller provided love, acceptance, daily assistance,
an income, and a home. Their deep friendship, and Macy’s
willingness to allow herself to be dependent on Keller, gave meaning
to Macy’s life. Macy regarded herself as a “badly constructed human
being,” perceptively providing a way to understand the complex adult
that the orphaned and deserted child of the Tewksbury Almshouse
became. Yet, we shouldn’t confine her to that characterization. As she
herself admitted, “some of us blunder into life through the back door.”
 
Though it may have been through the back door, and blunder she did,
she entered into life fully.
 
Indeed, she saw the benefits of blundering, and faltering through life
didn’t bother her. “If all people knew what was good for them and acted
accordingly, this world would be a different world, though not nearly
so interesting. But we don’t know what’s good for us, and I’m spending
my days in experimenting. The experiments are amusing—and sometimes
costly, but there’s no other way of getting knowledge.”
 
This remark characterizes Anne Sullivan Macy perhaps better than
anything else. From childhood on, many others had held firm opinions
about what was good for her. Those opinions could amuse her, wound
her, or strengthen her, but in the end her determination to discover
her own life path lay at the very core of her character. She knew she
had made mistakes—some of them profoundly painful. Whatever the
benefit, whatever the cost, she had to discover for herself what was
best. The marvel is the ferocity with which she thirsted to discover life,
in its pains and its joys, for herself. As she said in concluding one of
her 1916 letters to Helen, “We have only to keep a stiff upper lip and
do our damnedest.”
 
After comp leting two previous books on Helen Keller I swore
I would never again write anything even remotely related to her. I
started a project far removed from Keller. I informed everyone in my
professional circle about that far-removed project in order to commit
myself to it.
 
Then I reread Anne Sullivan Macy’s 1916 letters to Helen Keller.
Macy had written them as she dealt with the illness that she thought
would kill her. The letters reveal an introspective woman trying to
understand her life. Vacillating between urgency and detachment, she
reflected on pleasure, anger, complacency, and amazement. It struck
me that her life embodied both contradictions and intensity: physical
pain, emotional pain, isolation, friendship, joy, intellect, tenacity, success,
and near constant self-doubt. Yet, as she thought about death,
as she pondered her life, she took immense joy in the daily life of the
Puerto Rican countryside where she was staying.
 
As I reconsidered Macy, I became convinced that I, and nearly everyone
else, had shortchanged the woman known only as the teacher
of Helen Keller. A new biography of Anne Sullivan Macy is greatly
needed, not only to do justice to her and to provide a peephole into
Keller and Macy’s multifaceted, and often surprising, friendship, but
also because our cultural memory mythologizes and simplifies Macy
as a straightforward educational superhero. She deserves more.
In addition, the increasing but still slow integration of people with
disabilities into education, the workplace, and the public world makes
this project significant. Macy’s disability did not occur in a vacuum,
isolated and abstract. Her daily experience of it was often defined by
context—by institutions, by the expectations of others, and by the
lack of social welfare support. Her life story, particularly when placed
alongside that of Keller, reminds us of the diversity of disability experiences
historically and today—and of the multiple ways that we, as individuals,
as institutions, and as a country, contribute to the disabling
nature of physical and mental impairments.
 
Surprisingly, telling the life story of Anne Sullivan Macy with her
as the central figure is a markedly new strategy. Numerous Keller biographies,
both older and more recent, discuss Macy but primarily as
an ancillary figure to the real star of the story. These include Joseph P.
Lash’s Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan
Macy (1980) and Dorothy Herrmann’s Helen Keller: A Life (1998).
Helen and Teacher provides the most complex analysis of Macy but retains
a nearly exclusive focus on her development and life as a teacher.
The most comprehensive biography of Macy is that of Nella Braddy
Henney, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller (1933). Endorsed
by Keller, approved by Macy, and written by an intimate friend
of both women, this book sought to establish Macy as a pedagogical
hero. Macy’s most recent adult biography, published over forty years
ago by Lorena Hickok, also defines her only according to Keller—even
in its title: The Touch of Magic: The Story of Helen Keller’s Great Teacher,
Anne Sullivan Macy (1961). Macy was Keller’s teacher, and proud of it,
but her life story is so much more complicated and interesting than
that single-minded characterization.
 
The goal of Beyond the Miracle Worker is to present Anne Sullivan
Macy in all of her complexity. First and foremost, by telling and analyzing
Macy’s life as her story—not Helen’s—this biography tells a new
tale. Beyond the Miracle Worker follows the accidental and unexpected
path an orphaned asylum child took to become a world-famous educator.
This includes an intimate depiction of growing up amidst the
horrors of a mid-nineteenth-century asylum, a rarely if ever told story
in U.S. history. It chronicles a tumultuous marriage. It analyzes the
adult life of a chronically ill, disabled woman whose public identity
excluded nearly all acknowledgment of her disability. It follows a smart
and ambitious woman trying to make a professional life in a patriarchal
society. And it traces the ever-changing friendship between Macy and
Keller, in which the deaf-blind Keller eventually cared for and became
the personal aid of her former teacher.
 
In many ways, Macy resembles an archetypal American figure—the
self-made man. As a young orphan housed in Massachusetts’s Tewksbury
Almshouse, she pleaded her way out with single-minded determination
by literally pulling on the sleeves of touring philanthropists
and begging for an education. Later on in her life, she exercised further
determination and retained control of the child Helen Keller—and
thus of her own professional life—despite the machinations of numerous
others who were far more powerful. With intense purposefulness,
she repeatedly created herself. The obvious complication, however, is
that though a “self-made man,” she was female, disabled, and of (to her)
shameful beginnings. Her life raises questions about the opportunities
available to women to reinvent themselves in turn-of-the-century
America.
 
A related theme is that of the narrow but changing economic and
professional opportunities available to women. Macy is contemporary
with the first generation of female college students who embraced pivotal
and important roles in U.S. social reform, education, and civic life.
She is a contemporary of those who—like Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop,
and Florence Kelley—developed and energized the settlement
house movement. She is, however, dramatically different. Though an
extremely brilliant woman, she lacked any educational training or advanced
degree, came from a family with no connections to wealth or
prestige, was deeply ashamed of her past, and had little involvement
in broad social reform. Other than her relationship to Keller, she had
few opportunities to build on for personal advancement. Those she
had came from flirtatious relationships with older men. From the time
of Keller’s college graduation in 1904 until the early 1920s the two
constantly sought new economic opportunities and stability as various
money-making attempts failed. While she and Keller clearly valued
one another, Macy clung to the relationship with such tenacity partially
because of the narrow options available for a woman of her class
and background, let alone one with a disability.
 
Also important to this biography and Macy’s life is the theme of
education. As a child, Macy grasped for an education as an escape,
and a redemption, from poverty and the almshouse. As an untrained,
inexperienced, and isolated young woman she accomplished a task
many had thought impossible: teaching language to the almost sevenyear-
old deaf-blind Helen Keller. Though not a Radcliffe student, she
attended the prestigious female college alongside Keller, fingerspelling
for her all lectures and books. Ironically, the woman who became
one of the world’s most famous educators had no educational training,
and did little regarding the education of others after her one student
became an adult.US

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