Best of the Independent Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2012, The. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ if literacy users themselves do not see their sociocognitive practices in everyday settings as important or powerful beyond the scope of their kitchens, where and with what practices do they see themselves contributing, via change or simply cooperation, to their communities or the world? The answer for the women in this study: traditional literacies, and especially writing.

      More Interesting Things to Do: Dee, Anna, and Donna

      Dee, Anna, and Donna are each semi-retired women who fill their free time with continuing education, community volunteerism, babysitting grandchildren, and social events. These women shared experiences with me regarding recipes that had a lot to do with their literate abilities, though nothing to do with cooking. Each coming of age during second wave feminism, or the time that Dee remembers as “women’s lib,” the three women balanced caring for their families with attending college and building their careers. They value their accumulated literacies greatly, having acquired them in spite of expectations of their families to assume traditional domestic roles and responsibilities as young women.

      These experiences and their reasons for joining the Red Hat Society cast a long shadow on perceptions of “home” as a productive or even pleasant place to be. As such, Dee, Anna, and Donna are prone to dismissing and belittling housework as a concern appropriate for a study on women. In relying on a key principle of Kathleen Weiler’s feminist research methodology, I aimed to emphasize “women’s lived experience and the significance of everyday life” and resist approaching the study of women from “a male hegemonic ideology or language” (58, 61). Weiler instead suggests that women’s consciousness:

      is grounded in actual material life. What focusing on the everyday life of women should do instead [of dichotomizing the public and private] is reveal that connection between public and private, between production and reproduction. In socialist-feminist research, the everyday world is not a self-contained world; quite the contrary, it is an integral part of the social whole. (61)

      Yet, as will become evident in this section, the dichotomy was palpable. Clearly, the differences between the women’s and my experiences, material circumstances, and generations were at play. Women like my participants contributed to the broad-scale social changes that removed “housework” as a fraught and gendered social expectation of many children of my generation. Thus, my freedom to embrace or reject housework in my everyday life allows me to consider it a subject of interest. The differences between our perspectives resulted in some uncomfortable moments during our interviews, and I suspect the women felt disappointment in what I was describing as feminist research.

      Despite having agreed to participate in the study and signing an IRB consent form, Donna, Dee, and Sandra were disconcerted by my interest in housework, and their reactions to some questions ranged from curiosity to disdain to ridicule. However, using an interview approach advocated by John Creswell comprised of “unstructured and generally open-ended questions that are few in number and intended to elicit views and opinions from the participants,” I followed the women’s leads as I learned more about them and their literacy practices (188). Moreover, according to Stephen Doheny-Farina & Lee Odell, “the researcher’s goal is not simply to confirm the researcher’s own intuitions or conclusions but to find out what the participant thinks—to stimulate the interviewee to express the meanings that he or she attributes to the topic at hand” (522). Dee, Anna, and Donna, in describing their uses of recipes in family history projects, self-sponsored writing projects, and community fundraising, were stimulated to express their disdain for the domestic and affirm their esteem of literacy in a traditional, text-based sense. Perhaps more importantly to them, discussing recipes also resulted in data that I did not anticipate: the questioning and critique of a (my) positive stance towards housework.

      Painting a mutually exclusive relationship between housework and one’s career, Dee and Donna both use the word “boring” to describe housework, and perhaps rightfully so given the variety of their interesting activities and commitments. Alongside contingent work as nurses, the two women volunteer at organizations as varied as the Providence Performing Arts Center, a nursing home, hospice care, and the city zoo. At the time of our interview, Dee was also enrolled in a Spanish class at her local senior center, an effort aimed at improving her communication with patients at an adult care center where she worked. Her prioritization of education and career and her concomitant attitude towards housework stem in part from her experience in at least one consciousness-raising group. Dee stated:

      Housework…it’s boring. I have more interesting things to do, and now I don’t have to keep clean for anybody in particular. I think people who don’t have much of an education might make more of it because that’s what they can be proud of. But, when you’re working and you’re educated, you want to be known for more than a clean house. I was, when women’s lib first started, I was in those groups…it was ‘where are you going in your life?’ rather than ‘what are you doing at home?” It was more than just raising kids. And I actually didn’t stay home that long with my kids, I was either going to school or working part-time when they were young, like when we adopted my oldest daughter I was getting my bachelor’s degree and then I got my masters when my youngest was a baby.

      In support of these accomplishments, Dee delegated housework, sometimes employing cleaners, au pairs to watch the children, and, when they were older, her children for a few extra dollars. Dee didn’t—and doesn’t now—cook much, so she is hard-pressed to recognize the usefulness of recipes in a traditional sense, saying: “I planned ahead because I was working full time. My daughter says she learned to cook by herself because ‘my mother was working.’ I used the crock-pot a lot because I could throw things in in the morning.” Dee sees this type of planning and organizing to feed her family as a way to minimize housework, allowing her to expend more of her time and energy on her career and educational goals.

      Yet, recipes remain important to Dee in a far different capacity than cooking; her main use of them comes in the form of preserving her family history. She keeps “two little [recipe boxes] with all the recipes I have in the kitchen…I have some of my mother’s that I keep because they’re in her handwriting. And, I have my sister’s cookie recipe.” As static texts, the recipes serve a memorial function, like heirlooms for Dee to save and pass down. They are reminders of the important women in her life, though not necessarily their cooking. And, while the recipes are artifacts of Dee’s mother’s and sister’s cooking literacy, Dee prizes them for their sentimental, and not practical, value. The material aspects of the writing—he handwriting, the boxes they are stored in, and their daily presence in Dee’s life—are most important for Dee, who values texts over cooking.

      Like Dee, Anna has prioritized other interests and responsibilities over housework, including her long-term babysitting commitment to her granddaughter, her main hobby of gardening, and her talent for creative writing. She compares the relative importance of housekeeping and pursuing a career, suggesting that women who have careers don’t or can’t focus on housework. She herself is retired Air Force administrative personnel, who worked mainly at a data entry job while her children were growing up. She also spent time volunteering in her children’s schools. In Anna’s experience, women like her who have careers and especially those with children hire help for housework. She explained her own attitude:

      I’m not into being like, super particular about everything because housework is boring. There’s a lot more interesting things to do than housework…I keep up the standards, but, you know, there’s too many more other things that are more interesting than just housework.

      For Anna, creative writing is one of those things. As a writer, she is known for composing rhyming tribute poems that celebrate, entertain, and sometimes poke fun at her friends and family members: “Sometimes it’s just to cheer somebody up, making fun of something so that it’s not a dreary event for someone, seeing the lighter side of something. Sometimes these little ditties just go through my head, so I sit СКАЧАТЬ