ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two enactments of literacy sponsorship involving older women in Paxton: participating in clubs and composing family histories. The author turn now to the literacy work that highlights the importance of the engagement, interaction, and meaning making borne out of club activities. Thus they were able to derive satisfaction from their sponsorship of learning by club members and members of the wider community and through their literacy work, described below, in order to carve identities as integral contributors and purveyors of local authority in this rural community. While ultimately not transgressing the agrarianist ideologies that pervade their rural area through traditional positions of power that are most recognizable, such as being a member of the school board or the mayor, these women do negotiate a kind of power in the community through being sponsors of literacy.
