Perhaps to learn how to do all these difficult things, we, feminist literacy workers, need to be engaging in more discussion and reflection ourselves. So I am back again to the fact that I have taken away from your writing two key questions to mull over: how to be true to our feminism in our work in the classroom and how to make time for ongoing reflection. They seem pretty clearly connected. They will of course lead me on to all those other important questions you raise, such as how to struggle with power differences or the difference between woman-positive and feminist, which I haven't even begun to speak about.

So congratulations for jumping into such difficult and thought provoking discussion and thank you for encouraging me to jump in too! Good luck with your ongoing reflection!

Commentary III

Ann McQuaid

It was with great anticipation that I read your article. I had heard bits and pieces about the work you were trying to do and some discussions around the woman-positive/feminist perspectives. I wasn't really expecting the tone of sadness and disillusionment that seemed to come through when I read it. You seem very hard on yourselves for what you were unable to do to introduce an active, engaging dialogue on feminist issues that would somehow feel empowering for both you and the women participants. Because of the focus of your article, the energy and dynamism of what you did do the support for the participants as they became members of the literacy club and acquired the skills that they would define as empowering - doesn't really come through.

I wonder if you've minimized your achievements on two levels. First, nurturing critical analysis is a vital part of good literacy instruction and it seems to me that is the groundwork for feminist thinking, particularly as you've defined it - the ability to formulate the "conceptual framework" that you talked about. I'm not sure that feminist classrooms imply "a need to be active in the political arena on a more collective level"; maybe what they suggest is a need to recognize the validity of one's own experience, that these conditions are predicated upon one's gender, and only collective action can change those conditions. Mohanty talks of writing which is used to create self-knowledge as an oppositional activity in itself.