ABSTRACT
Rural women, worldwide, are often the targets of literacy programs. This makes it incumbent on us to understand the powers literacy might offer rural women. In the United States, the rural region that has most been targeted for literacy intervention is Southern Appalachia. In this chapter, author argues that to understand these women’s motivations to pursue literacy, we must redefine the traditional concepts of the powers of literacy, the privileges it provides, and the public/private distinction that has often been made to distinguish between the power of literacy in men’s lives and women’s lives. Ultimately, she suggest that understanding literacy as both a “performance,” in the folkloric sense, and as a relational tool best describes the power literacy can have in the lives of the women she interviewed in Haines Gap.
