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.
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