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Helen Keller was best known as the little deaf and blind girl whose early life inspired the stage play and the movie "The Miracle Worker.
" Marlee Matlin was first known as the young deaf actress from the show "Children of a Lesser God.
" However, despite the differences in their situations, there are some striking similarities between the lives of these two remarkable women.
Helen Keller was born in 1880 in Alabama.
Marlee Matlin was born in 1965 in Illinois.
Apart from their deafness, what similarities could there possibly be between them? Both children were born sighted and hearing.
At the age of eighteen or nineteen months, both girls suffered high fevers which resulted in Marlee's profound deafness and Helen's profound deafness and total blindness.
Both families refused to allow their young daughters to live away from home.
After visiting several distant residential schools for the deaf, the Matlins enrolled Marlee in self-contained and mainstreamed classes near home.
After considering putting Helen in an asylum, the Kellers kept her at home and hired twenty-year-old Annie Sullivan, who was herself visually impaired, to give Helen her first years of education.
As young women, both attended college.
Helen Keller was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor's degree.
Both were performers: Marlee Matlin's ongoing career is well-documented, and Helen Keller and her teacher traveled the world, first on lecture circuits and then in Vaudeville shows.
Both women became devoted advocates for raising public awareness of deaf, deaf-blind and otherwise challenged people.
Helen Keller spent most of her adult life touring the world, working for improved education for the deaf and deaf-blind.
Marlee Matlin is a spokeswoman for the National Captioning Institute.
She was instrumental in the passing of a law that required all televisions 13 inches or larger to have built-in chips that enabled closed captioning for the deaf.
This opened up a much larger world for deaf viewers, and has been called a "godsend" for the deaf.
And what about the differences between these two women? These are also remarkable.
There were no support services available to Helen Keller in her early life.
At the turn of the 20th century, there were no mainstreamed or self-contained classrooms for challenged children in schools.
When Helen was turning seven years of age, she was mute and behaviorally uncontrollable.
Had her behavior not improved, she would have remained uneducated and shut away at home her entire life.
At worst, she would have been sent to live in an asylum.
A few weeks after Annie Sullivan arrived at the Keller home, Helen discovered words and the fact that they have meaning, and began learning her first sign language fingerspelled words.
As an adult Helen made very difficult trips around the world with her teacher, to make their speeches and appearances in order to strive to better the lives of the deaf and deaf-blind.
At seven years old, Marlee Matlin was attending summer camp, and appearing as Dorothy in an after-school production of "The Wizard of Oz" with deaf and hearing children.
She attended specialized classes that made the most of her scholastic abilities.
Travel is much easier now than it was in the early 1900's, and making appearances via "telepresence" is now common.
Marlee Matlin's career achievements and many of her advocacy activities and accomplishments can be found with a few clicks of a mouse.
These two women have led very different lives, but they shared a purpose of service to challenged people.
Helen Keller and her teacher, and other pioneers like them, paved the way for Marlee Matlin and others like her who have helped make such great strides in education of the deaf and deaf-blind.
Visit hearmore.
com for more information and assistive devices for the deaf and hearing impaired and for more independent living.
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