I have stayed away from including these incidents of violence to avoid feeding into racist, class-biased stereotypes about the Mexican immigrant community. While all women do not talk of violence, under conditions of systemic sexism, women are oppressed through sexual practices enshrined as normal by the family, church, and other social institutions. While its form may vary and take a more subtle shape, violence toward women is not limited to particular class or culture - and it has serious consequences for women's right to learn as well as for men's.

It saddens me greatly as I write this. I have lived in the face of male rage and violence. I have a feeling for what it means to live daily in the fact of threat, never knowing what act will be interpreted as a transgression, an attack upon male right or power, setting off an explosion. You do nothing to set off that rage and withdraw into the safety of a kind of death. You do not even consider moving in what might be perceived as a threatening direction.

Literacy is caught up in this dynamic of threat and withdrawal; for women, it is lived as part of the relationships of domination in the family. Husbands do not have to oppose their wives taking classes directly for the wife to censor herself and never consider that possibility. In situations where violence is part of daily life, and overwork already severe, it is almost impossible to find the energy to move in new directions, let alone those which may incite further upheaval.

This may explain why women are more likely to develop their English literacy skills once they are separated or divorced. Several of the women we interviewed had left their husbands and talked of changing their lives through education, especially those who are younger and know enough English to see a different kind of work. This is also true of the married women who have the support of their husbands. Youth, education, and knowing some English tend to go together, as does the desire for a better life.

Another key element is that women do not think of literacy, education, or learning as a right for themselves. When these are perceived as a right, it is as a male right. Several of the more articulate men we interviewed consider learning English, literacy, and education in terms of rights, for themselves and their children. Women frame their lives in terms of family relationships. Men present themselves as the agents of their lives and talk primarily about their own experiences, whereas the women talk about their families, especially their husbands' experiences and their hopes for their children. Within the family women never put themselves first, but always last. Elena, a highly educated, gifted woman we interviewed, now working as a domestic, explains how it is that she thinks of her life as a success:

Yet Elena had to stop taking English classes because she could not find the time, with family responsibilities and working as a domestic labourer six days a week. She accepts that she will never return to her profession, and devotes all her energy to providing a better life for her children.

Not to conceptualize themselves as having rights, to put themselves last, whether by choice or force, and to take on the bulk of the work of the family, is typical of the women we interviewed. This is how domination is lived through the gendered practices of the family; these practices are taken to be natural and normal; it is how literacy is gendered.