Anne Sullivan(1866–1936)

Anne Mansfield Sullivan was born on the fourteenth of April 1866 at Feeding Hills in the western Massachusetts farming district of Agawam, eldest child of Thomas Sullivan and Alice Cloesy, both Famine emigrants from the Catholic Limerick Sullivans of the early 1860s. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was eight, her father (an alcoholic itinerant farmhand) abandoned the children, and she was placed at ten with her younger brother Jimmie in the Tewksbury State Almshouse outside Lowell, Massachusetts, the largest indoor pauper institution in the state. Jimmie died at the almshouse three months after their admission; Anne stayed at Tewksbury for four years.

She had contracted trachoma in early childhood and was nearly blind by the time she entered the almshouse. In October 1880, in her fifteenth year, she petitioned the visiting inspector of the State Board of Charities Frank Sanborn for admission to the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston (founded 1829, the first school for the blind in the United States); Sanborn arranged the place, and she entered the Perkins School in October 1880. She underwent two eye surgeries at the Perkins under Dr Bradford that restored partial useful vision, took the regular Perkins curriculum, learned the manual finger-spelling alphabet from the older Perkins blind girls Laura Bridgman (the deaf-blind Perkins pupil of the 1840s) and her contemporaries, and graduated valedictorian in June 1886 in her twentieth year.

On the third of March 1887, on the recommendation of the Perkins director Michael Anagnos, she travelled to Tuscumbia, Alabama, to take the post of governess-tutor to the six-year-old Helen Keller, deaf-blind from a meningitic illness at eighteen months. She arrived at the Keller plantation house at Ivy Green on the third of March 1887, an exhausted twenty-year-old former pauper inmate of the Tewksbury almshouse with partial vision and no formal teaching qualification beyond the Perkins School diploma. Through the first three weeks at Ivy Green she fought a hard physical battle of will with the wild, hand-fed, undisciplined Helen to establish the prerequisite physical-and-behavioural order that any teaching would require. On the morning of the fifth of April 1887, in the small pump-house at the back of the kitchen garden, with the water running over Helen's right hand, Anne spelled the letters W-A-T-E-R into Helen's left hand and Helen, in the famous account she gave in her 1903 autobiography The Story of My Life, suddenly understood that the cool flow over the one hand had a name, that the name was the finger-pattern in the other hand, that names existed, and that everything in the world had one. Within an hour Helen had asked Anne for the names of thirty things.

Anne stayed with Helen Keller as teacher, companion and amanuensis for the next forty-nine years to her own death in 1936. The two of them moved north to the Perkins School in Boston in 1888 for the formal continuation of Helen's education, then to the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York and the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in Massachusetts, and from 1900 to Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Helen took her BA in 1904 (Anne attending every lecture beside her and finger-spelling the content into her hand). They settled at Wrentham, Massachusetts, in 1904, moved to Forest Hills in Queens, New York, from 1917, and through the next two decades conducted the long lecture tours of the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and Japan that built Helen Keller into the most-known living deaf-blind person in the world and through whom Anne Sullivan and the manual finger-spelling method of communication became the central institutional symbol of disability-rights teaching of the twentieth century. Anne died at the Forest Hills house on the twentieth of October 1936 in her seventieth year; her ashes are interred at the National Cathedral, Washington DC, the first woman to be so interred. The Sullivan name in modern American education carries the weight of the morning at the pump-house at Ivy Green on the fifth of April 1887.