ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the social purposes and dominant forms of adult education for poor, working-class, and peasant women in both the First and the Third worlds, whether informal, nonformal, or formal. Informal and nonformal education focuses on the question of knowledge and its social construction. It may involve upgrading an existing labor force or skilling the unemployed labor force either to enter the existing labor market or to work more effectively in the informal sector. A critical part of women's organizing has been the informal and nonformal education that has been integral to it. Black women, lesbians, and women from the Third World ground such critiques on analyses of their experiences, which reveal that it is not only sexism that must be considered and dealt with by feminist theory and practice but also racism, homophobia, class oppression, and imperialism.
