When women talk of literacy, they speak of desire. They have to desire themselves to one day learn English, but most keenly they feel the desire that their children become educated. Literacy as education symbolizes hope for a better life, a way out of the working class into a world of middle-class culture and lifestyle. The dream for most is to enter this world through secretarial work, and for some through nursing or teaching. For women whose only options are field, domestic, or factory work, the world of commercial and professional practice holds the hope of being "somebody." This is what Maria means when she says, " I would like to be somebody, you know."

Yolanda, working nights as a cleaning woman, talks of saving to send her daughters to finishing school and of providing them with a superior education so that:

Office work is clean work; it is also the way to meet a desirable partner for those who are unmarried. It also conforms to dominant cultural images of femininity which depict slim, well-dressed, unmarried, beautiful, smiling women working in offices. This image holds out the promise of marriage to a non-macho male. Marriage is not questioned. The violence of marriage is seen in terms of machismo, not the institution itself and the power dynamic it constitutes.

The women we interviewed cannot learn enough English to move into the next strata of occupations open to them. Efforts to train women for work in the trades will be problematic unless the issue of literacy as desire is addressed. The women we interviewed do not want to be machinists; they want to be secretaries - and this work is being revolutionized by technology.

To seriously act upon the principle of literacy or learning as a right - or even a possibility - for women, we must reconceptualize "the political." Our work suffers from a splitting between the public and private which reinforces the domination of women through gender practices. While we've begun to look into reproductive practices, we are wary of acknowledging the centrality of family, religious, and other cultural forms, or sexual practices, to women's oppression. We act as though literacy is neutral, apart from these forms, and so miss its charged dynamic for women. We must be willing to venture into the sensitive world of the supposedly private sphere; the sanctified realm of the family and church, the hidden realm of the sexual, if we are to be with women politically.

This is an excerpt of the original version of a paper presented at the Women and Education Conference held in Vancouver in 1986.

Reprinted from WEdf, Spring 1987, Volume 5, Number 3.

Kathleen Rockhill has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Adult Education at OISE since 1983, when she moved from Los Angeles where she was a member of the faculty at UCLA. Since coming to Canada, she has been working on developing a feminist critique of adult education. She is particularly interested in theories and practices relating to the development of feminist critical consciousness, both in education and research.