Women Who Changed My Life

Helen Keller: The first woman outside my family who made an impression on me was Helen Keller. It happened this way: when I was eight, my mother took me to see “State Fair” and “The Miracle Worker” as a double feature at Radio City Music Hall. She thought I would love “State Fair” and find “The Miracle Worker” too heavy. She was mistaken.

Halfway through “State Fair,” when the actors were singing some insipid song about an elephant on a revolving platform, I jumped out of my seat, put my hands on my skinny hips, and said loudly, “This movie is about absolutely nothing!” Then I sat down in a huff and endured the rest of the film in stony silence.

But when “The Miracle Worker” came onscreen, my whole attitude changed. I was fascinated by Helen. It amazed me that even before Anne Sullivan came to educate Helen, she had adapted herself so well to her surroundings. In her autobiography, Helen Keller mentioned her early childhood days and how she figured out how to steal keys and lock people into various rooms. She locked her mother into the pantry and when Anne Sullivan first arrived she locked her into her bedroom too.

Of course, an ordinary child would have been punished but because of her disabilities Helen was left undisciplined until Ms. Sullivan arrived. Helen described the amazing moment of enlightenment at the water pump when she realized that the letters Anne Sullivan spelled into her hand meant water, the cool liquid flowing over her fingers, and how she put it all together, saying her baby word, “Wa-wa,” over and over again.

Because I was such an avid reader, I identified with Helen’s giddy excitement as she rushed about asking Anne Sullivan the name of each object she touched. It reminded me of the rush of excitement I’d felt just 3 years earlier, when I suddenly realized I was able to read without sounding out the words on the page.

After the movie was over, I wanted to know more. I went to the library and checked out every book there was on Helen Keller. Also at that time, JFK was President, and some toy company came out with a doll called “Caroline” that bore some resemblance to Caroline Kennedy. I received this doll as a gift, possibly for my birthday.

But in my eyes, this doll was not the President’s daughter. She also bore a resemblance to Patty Duke in the role of Helen Keller. So I named her Helen, appointed myself Anne Sullivan, and learned the sign language alphabet (called, in those pre-PC days, the “deaf and dumb alphabet.”). My “Helen” was about three feet tall and her special feature was that she would walk if you led her by the hand. So I led “Helen” about and spelled words into her hand, just as I had seen Anne Sullivan do in the film.

I don’t know how long I persisted in this game with my “Helen Keller” doll but I do know that Helen Keller made a profound impression on me of someone who was handed massive obstacles and yet overcame them to put her mark on the world.

Several years later, I read a Reader’s Digest article by Helen Keller, describing in vivid detail what she would do if she were to receive the gift of sight and hearing for just 3 days. The article could have been, but was not, filled with poignant longing and self-pity. Instead, it was full of a reverence for the world of the senses. It was an inspiration and a reminder to appreciate the precious gifts of beauty we have access to just by virtune of being able to see and hear.

Things I learned about Helen Keller when I researched her recently didn’t quite penetrate into my awareness as a child. I had no understanding yet of what a feat it was for her to graduate from Radcliffe at the age of 24, only 17 years after she understood her first sign-language word! I didn’t realize what an accomplishment it was for her to learn to speak aloud words she could not hear, or to learn French, German, Latin and Greek in addition to English! So as I researched her, Helen Keller has continued to rise in my estimation. Finally, she devoted her life to traveling and speaking on behalf of the Foundation for the Blind. As someone who is very much interested in nonprofit work, I admire her for this as well.

Anne Frank: At first I hesitated to list Anne Frank as a woman who changed my life, because she was murdered in her teens and never became a grown woman. Nonetheless, the budding woman who left her legacy to the world had a profound influence on me.

I must have been 10 or 11 when I first read her diary. Wisely or unwisely, I had already been exposed to images and stories about the Holocaust, particularly at Jewish-run summer camps. In the mid-sixties, there was a definite focus on making sure that children born after World War II remembered the Nazi horror. So I don’t remember now whether I acted the part of Dussell, the old-fashioned and intolerant man who made it so difficult for Anne to sleep, before or after I first read her diary.

But I do know that I immediately fell in love with it. Horrible though their situation was, I found a certain romance in their Secret Annex and the measures they took to keep themselves from getting caught. I impressed my Barbie dolls into service and acted out scenes from the diary with them, with Barbie’s little sister Skipper playing the part of Anne.

I don’t know how many times I read Anne Frank’s diary while I was growing up. I do know she inspired me to start my own, in a daily planner bound as a hardcover book. Some days I had nothing to say, and it was hard to fill up that single page. As I grew older and had more to write about, I found the single page restrictive and sometimes my writing began to spill over onto the next page.

As I entered adolescence, I began to identify with Anne’s teenage struggles to find herself. Her fights with her mother mirrored mine even though the subject matter was surely different. She was critical of the Van Damm’s who shared their hiding place, especially Mrs. Van Damm, who, according to Anne, flirted openly with her father. As an early teen, I could well identify with the feeling of discovering the hypocrisy of the adult world. Growing up in the late sixties and early seventies, it seemed like the whole world was disgusted with the hypocrisy of previous generations.

But here came Anne’s one and only “love affair.” She and Peter both perished, and their brief happy time together turned out to be all they were ever going to get. If they were a little older, a little more rebellious it would have progressed further, and in a sense, why not? But they weren’t despairing. Anne was able to look out at her little strip of sky, all she could see of the outside world, and still have hope that the war would end, that persecution would end, and that she would live out her life in peace.

That didn’t happen, of course. The families were captured and of them all, only her father survived. By a remarkable stroke of luck, Anne’s diary was not destroyed when she was arrested, and that’s why we all know the inspiring story of the young woman who never got to be an adult, yet gave the world the gift of her optimism and courage.

Sometimes I wonder about Anne Frank. Suppose she had escaped and lived to a ripe old age. She might still be alive today. Would she have placed her mark on the world? Was she exceptional in her optimism and faith in humanity despite the horrors happening around her? Or would any other teenager under similar circumstances react the same way?

In fact we know that many people did not react the same way. Depression and suicide was not unusual at that time. In 1998 we visited my cousins, New York transplants living in the Netherlands since 1969. One day Fran took us to a Jewish cemetery in Wassenaar and pointed out that there was a jump in the number of headstones with death dates during the World War II period. Apparently many Jews, expecting the worst and not wanting to allow their fates to rest in hostile hands, committed suicide as the Nazis invaded the Netherlands.

But despite the deprivations, the days of sitting in silence lest the office workers below hear a floor creak above their heads, and the ever-present fear of being caught, Anne never expressed suicidal thoughts. Instead, she and her sister dutifully educated themselves and prepared for an adulthood after the war, an adulthood that never came. How many of us could stick to our lessons under similar circumstances? Wouldn’t it seem futile? And yet they persevered.

Also on that visit to the Netherlands, our very first stop was at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. We got to climb up into the Secret Annex, which is now preserved as a museum, even to the postcards and pictures of movie stars that Anne and Margot kept on the wall. I was emotionally touched to be standing in the very rooms I’d read about so many years ago. I can’t say I felt Anne’s presence, but I felt as if the walls remembered her.

Anne Frank’s experiences and her belief in the goodness of humanity influenced me profoundly and started me on a lifetime of journaling, even though I have destroyed some of those journals. I owe her a great debt for being such an inspiration to me, and honor her as a “woman who changed my life.”

Jane Goodall: I was on my way to an interest in anthropology before I ever heard of Jane Goodall, but she was a major influence on me nevertheless.

As a child I developed an early interest in science. I read books about astronomy, and also about Earth’s pre-history. The development of life and the various stages of evolution that plants and animals went through in order to become what they are today fascinated me. So I read books about the dinosaurs, their environment, and the discovery of their bones.

This led me into reading books on human evolution. I read about Lucy, about Peking man, about Dart’s baby. I knew the names of the various species of hominids, knew their eras, and knew their tools and other artifacts. I was fascinated by the cave paintings and the ritual burials, heralding the dawn of a religion. I also was intrigued by the split off of humans from the other primates.

Although we did not yet know just how closely related humans and chimpanzees are, sharing over 98% of the same genes, in the 1960’s we did know that chimps are our closest animal relatives. So in 1966, when I heard there was going to be a National Geographic special on Jane Goodall, a young Englishwoman who went out to the African jungles to study chimps, I had to watch.

I was captivated immediately by Jane Goodall’s fearlessness and her intimate knowledge of the chimps. She actually gave them names, coded by letter for each family. Thus Flo, Freud, and Frodo were all of the same family line. She found a way to categorize the family groups and yet respect their individual personalities. This earned her the ridicule of many scientists who wanted to keep their distance from their animal subjects. Jane Goodall appeared on the cover of National Geographic, something that “serious scientists” never did. This earned her more ridicule, and remarks about “Blondes in the Jungle” began floating around.

Yet, Jane Goodall made discoveries that caused us to redefine our concept of what it means to be human. In the early sixties, she observed chimpanzees not only using tools but modifying natural objects to better suit their purposes. She saw chimps using thin sticks to poke into termite holes, and then withdraw them with termites clinging to them, for a tasty treat. Not only that but she also observed them stripping the twigs of leaves so they would better fit down the termite holes. So, this young woman who grew up in modest circumstances and had only a high school diploma when she began her fieldwork, revolutionized primatology as we know it today.

Later on, Jane Goodall went on to achieve a Ph.D. and to found the Jane Goodall Institute. In her seventies now, she still travels the world for an exhausting 50 weeks a year, speaking on behalf of her beloved chimps, animal rights, impoverished people, and the environment. For two weeks each year, she takes a “vacation” in the Gombe where she first began her studies, refreshing and renewing her spirit.

Dr. Goodall has faced other turning points in her life. In “Through a Glass, Darkly,” she records later observations of chimps that revealed their dark side. In short, chimps, especially young male chimps, make war on their own kind, maiming and killing chimps from other troops. Even female chimps can be killers, sometimes slaying and eating a rival’s infants. This discovery put her at odds with much of the scientific world, that did not want to hear that the human propensity for cruelty and violence may be imprinted in our genes. In her spiritual memoirs, “Reason for Hope,” Dr. Goodall gives us insight into the spiritual struggle she went through while absorbing this unwanted information.

Yet Jane Goodall does find reason for hope, and she finds it in youth. Through the Jane Goodall Institute she has founded Roots and Shoots, which engages young people around the world, from preschoolers to college students, in projects to benefit animals, impoverished peoples, and the environment. As Jane Goodall says, she can’t save the whole world, and these groups of young people are doing the work that she cannot. Yet, she firmly believes that every one of us can make a discernible difference in making the world a better place.

Jane Goodall’s influence led me into majoring in anthropology. I had visions of going on fossil digs, until I realized that one scorpion or one hideously large insect would send me fleeing homeward on the next plane. But all my life I have admired and respected Jane Goodall for what she has accomplished, armed at first with only a high school degree, secretarial training, and a huge helping of courage and compassion. She has spent 50 years following her dream of a better world with kindness for all earth’s creatures.

Jane Goodall is the only one of these 3 women I had the privilege of meeting in person, at Danbury Connecticut last April. It was a peak moment for me to be able to tell her that when I had breast cancer, I put seeing her in person on my “bucket list” and how happy I was to finally speak to her in person as she autographed one of her books for me.

It would not be fair to praise these three outstanding women without mentioning the women who stood behind them. For Helen Keller, it was Anne Sullivan’s love, perseverance and dedication that made it possible to become her best self. For Anne Frank, it was the courage of Miep Geis, a Dutch woman who brought necessities to Anne Frank and her family and helped them to escape detection as long as they did. For Jane Goodall, it was her mother, Vanne Goodall, who accompanied Jane into the bush for the first months of her fieldwork, when Tanzanian officials would not permit a lone woman to camp there. They, too, deserve to be honored during Women’s History Month.

All three women, Helen Keller, Anne Frank, and Jane Goodall, came to my attention and earned my admiration while I was still a child. Today, I still admire them for their determination, their bravery, their compassion, and their hope. They have influenced me in ways I had not examined closely before deciding to make this presentation, and it is my pleasure to bring their stories to you. Thank you.