money to buy her own house. Helen was very religious and her faith led her to examine the world more and more carefully. She began to see that there was great injustice in the world and that people were not treated equally. Blindness was often caused by disease which was often caused by poverty. She became a suffragette and a socialist and demanded equal rights for women and better pay for working class people. She also helped set up the American Foundation for the Blind in order to provide better services to people with impaired vision. She toured the country, giving a lot of lectures. Lots of books were written about her and some plays and films were made about her life. Eventually she became so famous that she was invited to Europe and received many honours from foreign universities and monarchs. In 1932 she became a vice-president of the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the United Kingdom. After her death in 1968 an organisation was set up in her name to fight blindness in the developing world. Today that agency, Helen Keller International, is one of the biggest organisations working with blind people overseas. Without the help of others Helen Keller would never have succeeded the way she did. She relied a lot on Anne Sullivan, who went everywhere with her for almost fifty years. But Helen Keller was very remarkable. She was very intelligent, sensitive and determined. She was the first deaf-blind person to make such a public success of her life. But she is not the only person with a hearing and sight impairment to succeed. She is only the best known. Maybe her biggest success was in convincing other people that disability is not the end of the world. One Japanese lady said about her, 'For many generations, more than we can count, we bowed our heads and submitted to blindness and beggary. This blind and deaf woman lifts her head high and teaches us to win our way by work and lau...
