Even though she was blind and deaf, Helen Keller was a woman with an extraordinary social vision. 61) When most women’s rights activists were working for the right to vote, Helen Keller advocated action that was more direct and more immediate than the vote. In 1911, speaking in England where women had the right to vote, she said: "Our democracy is but a name. We vote What does that mean It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats... You ask for votes for women. 62) What good can votes do when ten-eleventh of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 men and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000 Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice"
63) When she became active and openly socialist, a New York city newspaper, the Brooklyn Eagle, which had previously treated her as a heroine, criticized that her misguided socialism had somehow developed from her blind and deaf condition. She replied that when once she met the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, he had complimented her lavishly: "But now that I have come out for socialism, he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error." She added: "Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! What an ungallant bird it is! 64) Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent. The Eagle and I are at war. I hate the system which it represents... When it fights back, let it fight fair... It is not fair fighting or good argument to remind me and others that I cannot see or hear. I can read. I can read all the socialist books I have time for in English, German and French. If the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle should read some of them, he might be a wiser man, and make a better newspaper. 65) If I ever contribute to the socialist movement the book I sometimes dream of, I know what I shall name it: Industrial Blindness and Social Deafness."