Bhasin criticizes Indian programs as preserving stereotypes which are not true to the lives of working class women. Primers depict women as wives and mothers in the household and ignore the roles women have as producers of food and labourers. They do not tell women of their rights, but seek to make them "better" wives and mothers. Junge and Tegegne (1985) speaking of the effect of a program on women's lives in Ethiopia mention that women "seemed to be conscious of taking better care of themselves and their families" (p. 612). Ellis (1984) is more critical of the problem of teaching women only roles of homemaker and mother. She suggests that women need to be taught more about their rights and given a broader understanding of the "attitudes and perceptions that determine and define the place of women in Caribbean society" (p.49).

When women are acknowledged as recipients of adult education programs, Thompson argues their "needs" are defined by men (1983a):

Women's real needs (i.e.. the definition women would make about themselves and their lives if men were not around or if men were not structurally in charge) are not being recognized or met (p. 86).

Women are taught to "cope" and adapt, to carry out their traditional roles better:

The suggestion that women might see the world differently or might deny the values and standards determined by men, appears incomprehensible to those well used to "meeting individual needs" and supplying "confidence" in remarkably predictable and sexist ways (p. 85).

Solity (1986) and MacKeracher (1987) both draw attention to the need for a "women's studies" model which encourages women to look at their own personal experience and locate this in terms of a "sociological and historical framework" (Solity, p. 4). MacKeracher states the criticism of traditional programs and demands an alternative:

Academic equivalency programs, which essentially provide for the remedial application of more basic education, may prepare women for occupational training and participation in the male- dominant world of work but do not solve the problem of "literacy for women". Programs which allow women to explore their own experience. make sense of that experience, and promote this "sense" into personal concerns and public issues can be best understood, not as remedial education. but as transformative participation in better basic education (p.12).

Many writers emphasize the importance of acknowledging the social constraints on women's lives. Hale (1986) draws attention to the inappropriateness of assuming that women will be made better mothers through increased knowledge, stressing the importance of understanding the social context of women's lives. In the Indian program she was studying, it was assumed that women needed knowledge of nutritious foods. But the impact of the education program's attempts to alter eating habits, was lessened because of a variety of material factors which were ignored by the program. The program had little effect because it taught women about nutritious foods, but ignored the fact that it is men not women who usually have the power to make the decisions over what is eaten in the household, and women's nutritional needs are traditionally accorded little importance. Its effect was also lessened because the women who actually carry out the cooking in the household had no spare time to attend classes. The material circumstances of women's lives are often ignored in this way, then women are blamed for lack of motivation when they fail to implement changes. McCaffery (1985) described the same problem in programs for women in England. She observes that as women's days are regularly scheduled round family needs and they are rarely able to spend money on their own education, they need programs offered at appropriate time, childcare provided and programs subsidized financially. De Coito (1984), from a study carried out in Canada, also identified the need for childcare to enable women to attend literacy and upgrading programs.

Thompson (1983a) sums up the invisibility of women, except as mothers, in adult education. The social conditions of being a woman in society - both material and personal relations and inequalities of power, and the control of men over establishing women's "needs" are frequently ignored:

The organization and provision of classes takes very little account of the social. economic, cultural and political conditions of being female in our society. The career structure, the responsibility for organization and control. the arbiters of the curriculum, and the opinion leaders and policymakers... are invariably men - men who operate firmly and squarely within the organizational structure, the cultural assumptions and the thinly disguised prejudices of patriarchal society. It is for reasons like these that so far as Russell was concerned. women were visible only as mothers, and totally invisible in every other respect (p. 81).

McCaffery briefly directs attention to the way literacy enters into the power dimensions between men and women in the household- She mentions male hostility to women not being at home when they return from work, and male refusal to "babysit" the children in the evenings. A recent media account also speaks of literacy as power: "Male egos take another battering in the war of the sexes.