LITMIR.BIZ

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Thus, my freedom to embrace or reject housework in my everyday life allows me to consider it a subject of interest. The differences between our perspectives resulted in some uncomfortable moments during our interviews, and I suspect the women felt disappointment in what I was describing as feminist research.

      Despite having agreed to participate in the study and signing an IRB consent form, Donna, Dee, and Sandra were disconcerted by my interest in housework, and their reactions to some questions ranged from curiosity to disdain to ridicule. However, using an interview approach advocated by John Creswell comprised of “unstructured and generally open-ended questions that are few in number and intended to elicit views and opinions from the participants,” I followed the women’s leads as I learned more about them and their literacy practices (188). Moreover, according to Stephen Doheny-Farina & Lee Odell, “the researcher’s goal is not simply to confirm the researcher’s own intuitions or conclusions but to find out what the participant thinks—to stimulate the interviewee to express the meanings that he or she attributes to the topic at hand” (522). Dee, Anna, and Donna, in describing their uses of recipes in family history projects, self-sponsored writing projects, and community fundraising, were stimulated to express their disdain for the domestic and affirm their esteem of literacy in a traditional, text-based sense. Perhaps more importantly to them, discussing recipes also resulted in data that I did not anticipate: the questioning and critique of a (my) positive stance towards housework.

      Painting a mutually exclusive relationship between housework and one’s career, Dee and Donna both use the word “boring” to describe housework, and perhaps rightfully so given the variety of their interesting activities and commitments. Alongside contingent work as nurses, the two women volunteer at organizations as varied as the Providence Performing Arts Center, a nursing home, hospice care, and the city zoo. At the time of our interview, Dee was also enrolled in a Spanish class at her local senior center, an effort aimed at improving her communication with patients at an adult care center where she worked. Her prioritization of education and career and her concomitant attitude towards housework stem in part from her experience in at least one consciousness-raising group. Dee stated:

      Housework…it’s boring. I have more interesting things to do, and now I don’t have to keep clean for anybody in particular. I think people who don’t have much of an education might make more of it because that’s what they can be proud of. But, when you’re working and you’re educated, you want to be known for more than a clean house. I was, when women’s lib first started, I was in those groups…it was ‘where are you going in your life?’ rather than ‘what are you doing at home?” It was more than just raising kids. And I actually didn’t stay home that long with my kids, I was either going to school or working part-time when they were young, like when we adopted my oldest daughter I was getting my bachelor’s degree and then I got my masters when my youngest was a baby.

      In support of these accomplishments, Dee delegated housework, sometimes employing cleaners, au pairs to watch the children, and, when they were older, her children for a few extra dollars. Dee didn’t—and doesn’t now—cook much, so she is hard-pressed to recognize the usefulness of recipes in a traditional sense, saying: “I planned ahead because I was working full time. My daughter says she learned to cook by herself because ‘my mother was working.’ I used the crock-pot a lot because I could throw things in in the morning.” Dee sees this type of planning and organizing to feed her family as a way to minimize housework, allowing her to expend more of her time and energy on her career and educational goals.

      Yet, recipes remain important to Dee in a far different capacity than cooking; her main use of them comes in the form of preserving her family history. She keeps “two little [recipe boxes] with all the recipes I have in the kitchen…I have some of my mother’s that I keep because they’re in her handwriting. And, I have my sister’s cookie recipe.” As static texts, the recipes serve a memorial function, like heirlooms for Dee to save and pass down. They are reminders of the important women in her life, though not necessarily their cooking. And, while the recipes are artifacts of Dee’s mother’s and sister’s cooking literacy, Dee prizes them for their sentimental, and not practical, value. The material aspects of the writing—he handwriting, the boxes they are stored in, and their daily presence in Dee’s life—are most important for Dee, who values texts over cooking.

      Like Dee, Anna has prioritized other interests and responsibilities over housework, including her long-term babysitting commitment to her granddaughter, her main hobby of gardening, and her talent for creative writing. She compares the relative importance of housekeeping and pursuing a career, suggesting that women who have careers don’t or can’t focus on housework. She herself is retired Air Force administrative personnel, who worked mainly at a data entry job while her children were growing up. She also spent time volunteering in her children’s schools. In Anna’s experience, women like her who have careers and especially those with children hire help for housework. She explained her own attitude:

      I’m not into being like, super particular about everything because housework is boring. There’s a lot more interesting things to do than housework…I keep up the standards, but, you know, there’s too many more other things that are more interesting than just housework.

      For Anna, creative writing is one of those things. As a writer, she is known for composing rhyming tribute poems that celebrate, entertain, and sometimes poke fun at her friends and family members: “Sometimes it’s just to cheer somebody up, making fun of something so that it’s not a dreary event for someone, seeing the lighter side of something. Sometimes these little ditties just go through my head, so I sit down and write them and then later I’ll go to add something or change them.” Anna sent me an example of her personalized specialty poems shortly after our first interview:

      One day in my e-mail I was surprised to see

      That someone actually wanted to interview “little ‘ole me”

      The young lady was a student and was working on her PhD

      So, in the interest of education I thought “why not me?”

      Anna’s hobby and talent explains some rhetorical aspects of her recipes, which exist as entries in a hand-written cookbook she is at work compiling. Anna laments the loss of some artifacts, including recipes and housework instructions she wrote for her daughter many years ago: “My daughter has been out of college for over ten years so [the recipes] that I wrote for her are long gone.” Therefore, Anna has re-written what she calls “the college recipes,” including the one pictured here for Tuna Noodle Casserole.

      The influence of Anna’s creative writing is evident in this example, as the recipe tends toward narrative form rather than practical instructions. As well, its presentation is attractive, centered on the page and written in pretty handwriting. Since she doubts that her daughter actually cooked this meal in the dorm, Anna writes the recipes to commemorate her daughter’s coming-of-age and not necessarily to keep the recipe in circulation as a cooking practice. In handwriting recipes out again, Anna revives the memories for both of them. Of the cookbook project, Anna says: “It’s still in the works…not very accessible right now. It needs to be organized,” highlighting the presentation of the document, its suitability to be considered a “book,” rather than the recipes’ potential for their typical use in the kitchen. The writing of this cookbook out of Anna’s own collection of recipes, which may have once guided her cooking practices in this kitchen, but don’t now, is a contribution to her writerly identity and legacy in her family.

      Finally, Donna also regards the importance of literacy in terms of writing; however, her recipes are directed toward an audience not only outside the kitchen, but also outside her family. As a member and former president of several community groups—a women’s church group, parent volunteer committees at her children’s schools, and a local hospital committee—Donna participated in compiling, publishing, and selling cookbooks as fundraisers for four different community organizations over the years, a fairly common fundraising activity. As I have described, Donna’s literacy efforts have been directed largely toward education: her children’s literacy learning, her own career training, and

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