ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we return to the cultural ecology of the last half of the 20th century to relate the stories of three White women who came of age in the late 1960s. What opportunities did these decades offer these three women and how might these opportunities have influenced their acquisition of the literacies of technology? These are the two major questions that organize the case studies in the following pages. As we note in other chapters, the cultural ecology within which literacy values and practices develop, both in general and in the more specific case of digital literacies, is complexly rendered at the micro-, medial, and macro-levels by a constellation of related factors: issues associated with race; overlapping formations of wealth, gender, and education; politics, social movements, and technological inventions, to name only a few. Thus, although some White women in our study who were born in the late 1960s-Paula, Mary, and Karen, as we saw in chapter 2-benefited from increased options for life choices (e.g., admittance to a greater number of colleges; increased job prospects; more educational opportunities at every level), by the time the three presented in this chapter were able to take advantage of these options, they had become almost invisible and were accepted as appropriate rights and privileges. Many of these new opportunities, however, had been brought about by the hard work and efforts of those associated with the Women’s Movement. Even as these opporturdties became accepted, other choices and challenges had emerged:
establishing a productive balance between career participation and parenting, dealing with issues of sexual reproduction, managing new relationships between and within conventional gender groups, As we have seen, too, some of the difficulties in acquiring literacies experienced by the African American women identified in the last chapter who grew up in the Jim Crow culture of the South changed during, and after, the U.S. protests and riots that marked the Civil Rights Movement (e.g., access to certain educational institutions and some patterns of employment), although those difficulties had certainly not disappeared. Other difficulties and challenges, of course, had also presented themselves (e.g., dealing with less visible, albeit no less invidious, forms of racism; coping with cultural and familial expectations; balancing values of home and school cultures), Clearly, however, the political activism that distinguished the late 1960s and early 1970s made huge differences in some people’s lives, at various times shaping, and being shaped by, the literacies that people struggled to attain and their success in acquiring these literacies. That some of the past achievements of social and civil rights activists continue to influence people’s lives and literacies today may be less obvious, as Nancy Whittier implies in the epigraph at the head of this chapter, they are nevertheless traceable to particular historical moments. In other words, the effects of these movements-both intended and unanticipated-continue to influence the cultural milieu in which people live, work, and learn.
