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recipes exactly, but will add herbs and spices to taste; sometimes she makes up recipes; at one point she describes making a vegetable and pasta dish similar to one she had as a take-away meal. (8)
Barton and Hamilton’s description of Rita is echoed in Donna’s and Edna’s practices, also notable for their extra textual, though rhetorical natures: the production of a meal rendered from material work with ingredients, amounts, and tools alongside flexibility in the wake of changing rhetorical elements such as purpose, audience, and available means.
Donna and Edna’s practices also exemplify what Barton and Hamilton call the “interpretive” aspect of literacy, or the “attitudes, values, and other social meanings which lie behind these activities” (151). On one hand, Edna’s motivations for her cooking literacies are ingrained through her cultural affiliation as an Italian-American and her experience in poverty as a child. Edna’s mother was widowed during the Depression after her and her husband’s grocery store went under. Edna was ten, and until she began work at a wire factory after her high school graduation, she, her mother, and three siblings at home lived on Social Security and an elder brother’s army wages. Edna and I discovered several similarities between her and my grandmother Helen, who sponsored my affinity for housework and whose practices inspired this project, in that they hail from the same culture and generation, each of them Rhode Island-raised daughters of Italian immigrants who themselves raised children in the 1950s and 1960s. Edna describes making “a triple batch of red sauce using five pounds of hamburg and three pounds of sausage on Sundays.” This Italian cooking shorthand—“red sauce” and “hamburg”—along with the very large quantities match the ways my grandmother both cooked and talked about cooking. Here, literacy is a tool to uphold traditions, her aims being the maintenance of practices, materials, and key cultural values of her New England Italian-American family.
On the other hand, Donna has rejected her family’s ways of cooking and available printed recipes based on her values of health and wellness gleaned from her professional knowledge. Donna pursued a nursing career in the midst of raising four children, and today she continues her education at the state college, along with staying current with the nursing literature of the day. Having resisted the expectations and scorn of her and her husband’s family to pursue her career, Donna imbued her housekeeping practices with her professional values of health and wellness. By doing so, she countered the philosophical underpinnings of her mother’s and her in-laws’ takes on, specifically, parenting and cooking.
For example, Donna prioritized playing with and reading to her children over a housework routine. She involved them in some chores through play, such as helping wash dishes or prepare meals. But she describes her commitment to their growth and development over household chores through a memory of walking with her children to the library every few days to fill their red wagon with twenty-five books at a time, the lending limit. She considers her way of caretaking “child-centered at the expense of housework,” while her European in-laws “put neatness over children.” In another instance of resisting ways of homemaking within her family, Donna shifted the focus of feeding her children from their discipline to their health. Since she grew up to resent her own mother’s model of feeding children based on a reward/punishment system, Donna drew from her nursing education to focus on food, as her original recipes exemplify, as an element of one’s health. Donna resisted these conservative values through her cooking literacies.
Whether or not literacy practices uphold or resist a particular value system or ideology is a central question in the study of social-practice literacy. While some contemporary scholars highlight the potential for critique and political action in literacy practices, such as Young’s “resistant literacy,” others are more cautious since they recognize that literacy endeavors can be halted by users’ subject positions and/or material resources (112). For instance, Brandt & Clinton are skeptical of the agency some scholars believe literacy affords its user because sponsors of literacy are often not at the scene of literacy and extend their influence without users’ awareness of them (349). Scribner also sees a need for this type of caution when she describes the metaphor of “literacy as power.” She writes: “the expansion of literacy skills is often viewed as a means for poor or politically powerless groups to claim their place in the world […] yet the capacity of literacy to confer power or to be the primary impetus for significant and lasting economic and social change has proved problematic in developing countries” (11-12). Indeed, while Donna’s and Edna’s original recipes offer evidence of how literacy affords its users the power to sustain or resist a value system, the fact remains that neither woman ascribes this type of social or ideological power to her cooking.
Recently, the work of Rumsey on “heritage literacy” has emphasized the importance of context and change in her study of Amish women’s “home-based or indigenous” literacy practices such as cooking and quilting (“Heritage” 584). Interested in how changing tools and technology affect these types of literacy practices, Rumsey highlights the recursive process that literacies undergo both in their routine performances and their longevity (or lack of) within a culture. She writes:
Connection of object to context is always evolving and always growing because objects change and the context changes over time. The object changes because people adopt and adapt new or different technologies and literacies, such as my mother getting an electric mixer or a wider variety of ingredients being available in grocery stores. Further, heritage literacy is recursive. As contexts and objects change, people adapt to these changes and change how they pass on their intellectual and literacy inheritances. (“Passage” 92)
Rumsey’s attention to how and not whether dominant social forces and groups of literacy users affect each other moves beyond considering literacy “as a dichotomous variable, perceived either as conservative and controlling or as liberating” (Graff xix). That is, rather than seeing literacy as a stable variable that exacts changes (or not) within a context, Rumsey sees literacy practices and tools themselves as flexible and changeable, working in contexts for users in specific, though perhaps fleeting, ways. This takes the onus off of literacy to be the game-changer that Brandt and Scribner have argued that it cannot be. A question therefore arises: 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.