Perhaps because they have fewer opportunities to learn English informally, the women want to take classes, and do, if possible, soon after they come to the country. If married, they often go with their husbands, or they go with a friend. As indicated, all but the highly educated will stop going, although the typical pattern is several attempts. This is because of the enormous pressure of their daily lives. In contrast to the men, women talk about worry, anxiety, too much on their minds and feeling too old to concentrate on the difficult and time- consuming endeavor of learning the language and yet, they express the hope that "God willing, I will learn one day." Like a refrain, it runs through the interview with Gladys.

I am thinking of going to school within the next year. I went a few years ago, but I didn't continue because I had a problem with my eyes. Youth has more capacity to learn. But the mind of the old woman (she is 41) has more trouble with it. One thing or other, it's difficult to hold the reins of a house and family. And another thing to worry about work and whether there is going to be food and rent.

Gladys sees learning English as going to school and learning. There is a point at which taking classes is no longer a question of learning English but of going to school. Initial efforts to learn the language are seen as self-defense, survival. This shifts to a frame of "advancement", of getting ahead. It is important to understand this distinction in order to understand how it is that literacy can be both the taken-for-granted work of women and a threat. As long as the reading and writing or spoken English are seen as the rudiments of survival, there is no threat. Learning and education are a different matter; they carry a symbolic dimension of movement into a better, more powerful class and culture -- another world, another life, which is both desired and feared.

Domination in the Family

The only woman we interviewed who has not been married is Clementina whose urgent desire is to find a man who will treat her well and marry her. Otherwise, as a traditional Latina, she says she will have to continue to live in the home of her parents. For the Latina, marriage is the rite of passage, and the only legitimate option available to get out from under her father's control. Most women marry in their teens and if they are not already pregnant, soon are and before long have several children. Immigrants from Mexico tend to be poor, have large families, and live in inadequate housing. These conditions contribute to the intensity of woman's oppression in the household.

Women do most of the work of the housework. In addition to domestic labour, they attend to most of the purchasing of goods, as well as transactions with social services, public utilities, clinics and schools. We were surprised to find that most transactions requiring the use of forms are handled by the women. The husband normally does the banking, but it is the wife who keeps track of the money. In a detailed inventory of English-language situations in everyday life, women report handling almost all of those which involve the use of the written word. Where community workers provide help to those in need of it, the woman acts as the mediator. The exceptions, where men do most of the work, are transactions in the areas of transportation and home repair.

When women enter the public domain where English language is spoken, they do so in ways that involve specific transactions in a variety of situations which do not occur on a regular basis. They do not experience frequent, repeated contact in linguistically similar situations, so they cannot learn to speak English through this work. If possible, they go with someone who can help them with English. They do, however, develop some facility in understanding English, especially in deciphering the many forms that come into the house. We learned this as women brought out papers for us to help decipher. We provided the help as they requested, but first asked what they thought the paper before us was about. In this way, we became aware that they can read more than they acknowledged.

Our staff talked a lot about what we increasingly noticed as the invisibility of women's literacy in English. In most cases, when asked, wives say that their husbands know more English that they do. When couples are interviewed together, the man agrees that he knows more English. Sometimes further questioning reveals that the wife can read more, but often her greater facility with the written word is unacknowledged. This is not meant to imply that literacy skills in English are good -- not that the literacy of the women is perceived to be less than it is, and that wives defer to their husbands as to who is more competent. My guess is that wives not only present their husbands as more competent, but believe that they are. Most of the women do not feel very confident in themselves, and talk of feeling ashamed. Several describe how their husbands "call them down," tell them they are stupid, illiterate, even whores; at the same time, they oppose their wives taking classes.