Is family communication primarily regarded a female responsibility?
Tricia Hartley, Chief Executive of Campaign for Learning, has contributed today’s guest blog, which is the penultimate in a series on women, learning, literacy and liberation.
Twenty-five years ago, Canadian researcher Kathleen Rockhill made a striking statement about power, responsibility and women’s literacy which has stayed in my mind. “Because it is caught up in the power dynamic between men and women,” she wrote, “literacy is lived as women’s work but not as women’s right.”
I suspect Rockhill’s comment will resonate with many women from diverse communities. In the 1990s, I came across an ironic illustration of what literacy can mean when working with multilingual women born in rural northern Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s and now living in Lancashire, who challenged my narrow understanding of written communication. Most of the group had had limited schooling, and as a result had phenomenal memory skills and an approach to the written word that centred on sharing and discussion.
My ‘outsider ethnography’ about literacy practices in this community for the 1994 ‘Worlds of Literacy’ compilation explains, “Letters in Urdu were exchanged regularly with relatives in Pakistan, and such letters tended to be written by one family to another family, with each family member passing on messages and news…In general, women were seen as ‘in charge’ of what went into such …communications…even when, as in many cases, they were not able to write the letter physically themselves. Women who were literate in Urdu often found themselves in great demand as scribes and helpers for friends and neighbours who had not had the same educational opportunities…”
“Alia’s mother had encouraged her to perfect her Urdu. Her brothers, however, had rebelled in their teens, refusing to go to after-school Urdu classes…Alia’s voice held a mixture of annoyance, affection and wry amusement as she described how she, who had always worked hard to do well at school, and who now had enough to do with five children, a part-time job and a husband working and studying long hours, was required at intervals to put aside what she was doing to write letters on behalf of her brothers who had, in her opinion, been simply too preoccupied enjoying themselves to learn the necessary skills themselves…Ironically, the fact that Alia was, in this sense at least, better educated than her brothers provided not a liberating influence, opening up new horizons for her, but a further aspect of the traditional female role of carer…and selfless helper of others.”
Communication systems have changed dramatically since then, with the advent of the internet, social networking and cheap telecommunications. But would I be wrong to suggest that in very many families and communities, ensuring we keep in touch with Grandma, by whatever means, is still primarily regarded as a female responsibility?
