An 'unsanitised' retelling of the lives of Helen Keller, Mabel Normand and Rosa May Billinghurst in a new podcast reveals their impact on modern feminism.
It sounds like the beginning of a vaguely inappropriate joke: what do the silent film actress, the suffragette and the most famous deaf-blind woman in history have in common?
But it's no joke. And in this case, fact is probably stranger than fiction because these three women - Charlie Chaplin's mentor, a brick-throwing activist and a revolutionary - were all disabled feminist pioneers of the early twentieth century.
Now, the inner lives of Mabel Normand, Rosa May Billinghurst and Helen Keller have been laid bare with a new "unsanitised" and fictionalised retelling of true events for a podcast.
Writer Louise Page, 27, from Northumberland, who has complex mental health conditions including bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, said she wanted to learn more about disabled early feminists after discovering how radically left-wing Helen Keller was.
Keller remains one of the most famous deaf-blind people in history, known for her activism, lecturing, writing and for being the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree - but her radical political beliefs are often left out of the narrative.
Page says: "I already knew about the widely told, sanitised, version of Helen Keller's life - which tends to focus on her progress after meeting her teacher Anne Sullivan, and then cuts out before her radical left-wing phase.
"But she was actually part of the Industrial Workers of the World [an international labour union], who were thoroughly socialist and had connections to anarchism."
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