Jamie: Did yours or the other women’s professional experience lend a lot to [the cookbook]?
Donna: Yes, we were very organized. All the women in one capacity or another worked outside the home. One woman especially, who was another RN, was definitely an advantage. She knew how to find a publisher to keep the cost reasonable and still be able to turn a profit. That [committee] was more structured, more direct. It took three or four months with a firm deadline. Others I’ve seen took over a year.
Donna’s late 20th century education and professional life are evident in her praise of the committee on which she served, especially the importance of organization, collaboration, and follow-through. Here, Donna aligns her work with “recipes” not with the domestic duty of cooking, but with her professional experience and knowledge. This corresponds with Donna’s underlying motivation in the creation of her original recipes—her value of education. She is proud of her contribution to the projects not as an authority with recipes, but as a commodifier of them, taking advantage of recipes’ material value in support of communities built on traditional Literacy. Perhaps it is not so surprising that committees such as Donna’s consider a book a worthy item to help maintain institutions of literacy such as schools and churches. I find it ironic, however, that given the strength of resistance to cooking and housework among the women in the study, of Donna’s generation and demographic, the committee would choose to sell cookbooks. Yet, Donna describes these projects as successful. The communities surrounding these institutions may not use the recipes for cooking literacy; however a book represents Literacy in its traditional form, and is therefore worth the community’s money, time, and respect. In undertaking projects for which recipes serve a public function, Donna sees the community groups she served as sites for which the process of writing and her expert literacies are more appropriate and impactful than in her home.
Dee, Anna, and Donna’s experiences acquiring professional literacies during second-wave feminism have shaped their views on what forms of literacy matter—writing and reading—as well as the limiting effect the “domestic” can have on those forms. Accordingly, since the women have little interest in the notion of cooking, or any chores they consider housework, as a set of practices worth their time and attention, recipes are mainly valuable to them when their purposes are other than simply practical and their audiences are located outside of the kitchen. In these capacities, recipes have provided each woman with an opportunity to leave a mark on her family and/or community, audiences far wider and far more important to these women than a single cook—especially if that cook is meant to be her. The women’s rhetorically diverse use of recipes as family histories, self-sponsored writing, and community service projects reflect Dee, Anna, and Donna’s commitment to and appreciation for the goals and contexts they see as most appropriate for Literacy.
A Case of Bifurcation?
Perhaps the most striking account of the women’s struggle between literacy and housework in this study is articulated by my participant Emme, the Queen of the Red Hatters, a single mother who put herself through college while caring for her two children. While Emme’s main contribution to the study concerns her leadership role in RHS outside of this account of recipe use, a brief story she shared with me speaks volumes about the home/work dichotomy present in the data. Balking at the idea that housework could be a priority for her while pursuing a career by way of a college degree, she says: “My housework consisted of opening a can of food up for the kids, dropping them at the babysitter, going to class, and then coming home to pick them up sleeping and lug them up the stairs.” A former military reservist, Emme has a reputation as the most fun-loving and “wild” Red Hatter. If Emme’s priority is to have fun and let loose, it is not only to escape from “various responsibilities at home and in the community,” as the Red Hat society mission statement suggests, but also to counteract a work history that, like the other women’s, pulled her in many directions and made housework a laughable non-issue (Red Hat Society).
One way to understand the strength of the women’s anti-housework conviction is the concept of bifurcated consciousness, which may account for the women’s simultaneous undervaluing of housework and their pitting the domestic against the professional, even when their commitment to a variety of literacy-rich pursuits is evident. According to rhetorical scholar Mary M. Lay, “a bifurcated consciousness potentially affects a woman’s ability to appreciate her own experiences and to interpret their meaning outside the gender role assigned to her” (Lay 85). For example, in her study of midwives’ arguments for their practice’s legitimacy in public policy, Lay asserts that the spokesperson for direct-entry midwives (as distinct from certified nurse midwives) was forced to leave out of her argument the fact that midwives rely often on their instincts and feelings, which comprise a strong knowledge base and successful practices. The reason for the omission was not only because experience-as-knowledge wasn’t “scientific” enough for her audience, but also because even when such instincts and experience work well, midwives have often downplayed their authority as knowers and therefore examples of their success are not powerful enough for a public policy argument.
In one instance, an apprentice midwife prevents a baby from bleeding to death simply by checking on him, but doesn’t give herself credit for saving his life: “I don’t like to think what might have happened if someone hadn’t investigated the little noises he was making” (86, my emphasis). In discussing the 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