Role of Women

When Keller wrote The Story of My Life she was not yet active in social reform. Still, her attendance at a college was an impressive feat for any woman at the time, and especially for a woman in Keller's special situation. Her determination to receive an education equal to that offered a man was set early in her life. She recalls in chapter eighteen, "When I was a little girl, I visited Wellesley and surprised my friends by the announcement, 'Someday I shall go to college—but I shall go to Harvard!' When asked why I would not go to Wellesley, I replied that there were only girls there."

Keller was deeply influenced by the intellectual and activist atmosphere of the progressive era in which she lived. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were still limited in their ability to sign...