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СКАЧАТЬ apprentice’s undervaluation of her role in the episode, Lay writes: “[the spokesperson’s] challenge, then […] was to legitimize midwives’ knowledge to establish the midwives as knowers despite cultural assumptions and individual perceptions that might discredit their knowledge based on experience” (86). Midwives, like other professional feminist communities, value ”women’s ways of knowing,” but don’t present the known as if it were a solid truth, an effect that Lay suggests results from a bifurcated consciousness.

      Extending the concept of bifurcation to my participants’ stances offers at least one reason why Dee, Sandra, Donna, and Anna tend to focus on a work/home dichotomy, even amid the obvious variety of their talents and interests. Must home and work mutually exclude each other? Perhaps it did for these women, since housework remained, even while enrolled in college or working full time, their own individual responsibilities. The women, each of whom in this case are/were married to men, point out that while their husbands were supportive of their professional goals in terms of financial and moral support, few of them provided specific help in terms of housework. Anna relates that sharing household duties is part of a learning process for married men today. She sees a more balanced attention to housework within heteronormative families such as her daughter’s and describes the arrangements for cooking, cleaning, and childcare of her daughters and sons-in-law: “Younger men expect to help with housework since their wives have careers. There was a strict gender division for housework in my time, for my generation, but not now.”

      Though their responses to questions regarding housework and literacy prioritize the professional over the domestic, none of the women solely identify themselves as professionals; indeed, their interesting variety of experiences is one of the reasons many of them enjoy the Red Hat Society so much. However, the women take similar stances regarding housework as an obstacle to more worthwhile professional, social, and personal pursuits: as Dee puts it, “more interesting things to do.” In disparaging housework, the women distance themselves from the site of domestic roles and responsibilities that, in their experiences, does not command respect in the same way other sites do. Sandra enumerates housework’s place in her life, which includes her marriage, her teaching career, Red Hat events, and avid travel: “Housework is not even secondary for women—more like 100th.”

      Rhetorical Recipes

      In terms of the sociopolitical effects attributed to literacy in its traditional sense, the women who focused their literate energies on their professional success and personal interests have indeed made significant changes on both broad and personal scales. The broader anti-sexist social changes to which my participants have contributed include the blurring of gender roles within families, wide-spread acquisition of professional literacies by women under daunting material circumstances, and wresting traditional domestic practices away from narrow conceptions of homemaking into sites of personal interest and satisfaction. The knowledge and skills the women have acquired in their range of literate experiences reflect Brandt’s view of literacy acquisition as a response to large-scale technological and social changes such as the proliferation of the service economy, women in professional settings, and digital technology (“Accumulating” 660). In fact, the pursuit of higher education and professional literacy by these women and others like them not only respond to, but constitute such social change. One can understand the prioritization of the women’s literacy practices.

      Yet, the question of what to do with the theorized sociopolitical potential of everyday literacies remains. That is, how do expanded notions of “literacy as power,” especially in regards to social practice literacy, help users if they themselves don’t recognize them as even worthy of a brief conversation? In this case, inquiry into housework literacy and recipes occasioned an at-times uncomfortable re-telling of the women’s struggles between housework and literacy, and I believe the women’s descriptions of their literacy practices interrupt what otherwise threatens to become a seamless feminist progress narrative. It certainly reminds me that my opportunities to study, write about, and do (or not do) housework exist because of the experiences of women like my participants—including my own mother, whose acquisition of professional literacy constitutes a similar story—to which I am indebted.

      The women’s struggles also offer support to Scribner’s “literacy as power” myth, since they manifest limits of the power that practices of both everyday and institutional literacies can afford their users. On one hand, Edna’s and Donna’s uses of recipes reflect their commitments to certain value systems that motivate their practices and afford the women opportunities to contribute to and/or change the lives of their families and communities—Italian-Americans for Edna, the health profession for Donna. However, the women render these contributions almost meaningless by chalking their proficiencies in the kitchen up to “instinct” and “playing it by ear.” One could also argue that these are such small and individual examples that there is no model that might be extrapolated and systematically employed to help those who are oppressed, as Brandt and Clinton have noted.

      Additionally, consider the element of disregard that my participants bring to discussions of housework and literacy, evidenced by Sandra’s scoffing and Dee’s description of housework as the drudgery of the uneducated. While these stances align with a long-standing feminist argument against housework traceable to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “sexuo-economic imbalance,” or the connection between women’s financial and social dependence on men, they also suggest emotional scars. The difficulty in pursuing literate success in the face of oppressive, gendered traditions has a long-lasting effect; not only has it minimized the participants’ esteem of “home-based practices,” but they continue to see housework as a threat to the rich lives they lead (Rumsey “Heritage” 584). Traditional literate success has not mitigated their resentment, even forty years after the fact.

      In providing an account of the literacy practices of the Red Hat Society, a community of women who have banded together based on their common and difficult work histories, this study does not seek simply to celebrate domesticity with an uncritical “girl power” stance. That is, I want to honor the women’s experiences while also conducting inquiry into what I see as a productive, though perhaps unpopular, context. Discovering the variations of the women’s recipes for a number of rhetorical purposes and audiences within the women’s families and communities unearthed very broad and flexible conceptions of what “recipe” can mean: cooking practices, interesting writing projects, or even a joke. For Donna and Edna, recipes are not a set of instructions, but an inventional resource for rhetorical decision-making in what is so often considered a limiting context. And, in their textual forms as relics and novelties, recipes comprise opportunities for Dee, Anna, and Donna to put their considerable knowledge and talents to the best uses they see fit, including to support traditional literacy institutions. The women whose professional literacies obscured the domestic obstacles in their way today enjoy a relative freedom to employ the literacy practices they wish in the contexts they wish, choosing to embrace, denounce, or ignore cooking and housework altogether.

      Notes

      1. These names are pseudonyms the participants chose for themselves.

      Works Cited

      Barton, Mary and David Hamilton. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. New York: Routledge, 1998.

      Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the 20th Century.” College English 57.6 (1995): 649-68.

      Brandt, Deborah and Katie Clinton. “Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as Social Practice.” Journal of Literacy Research 34.3 (2002): 337-56.

      Cooper, Sue Ellen. The Red Hat Society: Fun and Friendship After Fifty. New York: Warner, 2004.

      Creswell, John W. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003.

      Doheny-Farina, Stephen and Lee Odell. “Ethnographic Research СКАЧАТЬ