4.0 Women, Poverty and Literacy

In grappling with the interface between literacy and women in conflict with the law, it is important to understand what is commonly meant by "literacy". In September, 1987, the Southam Literacy Survey was released, revealing that a shocking five million Canadians were "functionally illiterate." In the course of this study, 25 "representative" Canadians were chosen to act as jurors. They were presented with a list of 38 questions compiled by Southam, and asked to indicate the 10 which they felt "ordinary adults should be able to answer correctly just to get by in today's society." (Southam, 1987) When respondents were actually tested, they were deemed "literate" if they were able to answer eight of the 10 questions correctly.

This testing illustrates an important problem in the field of literacy; it is very difficult to determine who is, and who is not, literate. Literacy itself has been defined as "educated", "schooled", "able to read and write", and "well-instructed" -- each of these definitions having a slightly different connotation, and each carrying an implied negative value judgment about people who do not live up to their criteria.

Increasingly, there has been a movement among literacy teachers away from attempts to define and measure literacy. No internationally-recognized inventory of skills exists, and even if such a scale were in use, literacy needs vary from place to place, culture to culture, and circumstance to circumstance. Literacy needs depend on technological, economic and cultural development, since different levels of proficiency are required to fulfil both social and individual needs.

Carmen St. John Hunter describes some of the difficulty in determining literacy levels:

"When adults are given passages to read in order to test their literacy level, what is actually revealed is their ability or inability to read the particular material provided. They are judged to be at a certain age or grade level an the basis of research done with children or on the basis of tasks considered important by literate test-makers. How these adults perform has little to do with their ability to carry out activities that are central to their lives. Nothing is learned about what they need or want to do with linguistic skills, not whether they can function in the concrete settings of their own, everyday lives." (WEI Reports)

As Tiki Mercury-Clarke puts it, "Is this shampoo for oily hair?/Do I add water to this milk?/How often must I take this pill?/I didn't know that it was made of silk .... What's the matter can't you read?/What's the matter can't you read?" (Canadian Woman Studies, Fall/Winter 1988) Illiteracy, the inability to perform tasks which "educated" people take for granted, is presented in documents such as the Southam survey as a threat to productivity and to Canada's national (financial) interests. Illiterate people are seen as "a problem", rather than a symptom of a diseased society.

Where does women's experience fit into the experience of illiteracy? First, literacy, like women's realities of poverty, physical and sexual abuse, and occupational limitation, cannot be separated from the social, political and economic milieu which creates it.