ABSTRACT
Reading and writing are temporal activities; they also enable us to shift time about. We read or write at particular moments; but in doing so, we transcend the moment. I have said that one of literacy’s attractions is the possibility it offers of “transport” out of the present time. This also implies an imaginative move out of the present place. What reading and writing both offer, as well as a journey out of “now”, is a means of migration out of the immediate “here”. For many of the mothers in this research here meant home: the only place where their excursions into reading and writing could happen. Home, the place from which they had no other escape, was-and still is, for many women-anything but a place of leisure. Home was their place of work. Literacy, as I want to suggest in this chapter, allowed not only the flight from present time, but a means to give distance to the immediate place.
