Making Meaning in (and of) Old Age: The Value of Lifelong Literacy

 

Fig. 1: Irene’s “To the ‘Maker of Music’” poem, originally written in 1935

 

The early literacy described by the women in my study had many benefits, some of which did not become apparent until years later. For one thing, their childhood involvement with reading and writing may be helping them to delay cognitive decline in old age. There is accumulating evidence of the cognitive benefits of literacy, not only during the school years but stretching into old age. The so-called Nun Study, which was designed by David A. Snowdon, an epidemiologist and professor of neurology, to learn more about the factors involved in Alzheimer’s disease, has shown a link between early literacy and improved mental functioning many years later. The cognitive condition of the 678 nuns in the study has been assessed regularly, beginning in 1986, and findings from the study have been reported in numerous medical journals (see, for example, Snowdon; Riley et al.; Snowdon et al.).

In addition to the medical data available to researchers, there is verbal data as well: the autobiographical essays the young women wrote before taking their vows. Ninety-three of these autobiographies (written at an average age of twenty-two) were selected for analysis. Susan Kemper, a psycholinguist experienced in studying the effect of aging on language skills, developed a system to analyze the autobiographies for “idea density” and “grammatical complexity” (Snowdon 109). Kemper and her team were not told anything about the participants’ current cognitive condition. After the early writing was coded for idea density and grammatical complexity, both factors proved to be statistically significant predictors of current positive cognitive status, with idea density showing a stronger relationship. This connection did not seem to be influenced by the nuns’ educational level or occupation. Commenting on this finding, Snowdon expressed surprise: “Somehow a one-page writing sample could, fifty-eight years after pen was put to paper, strongly predict who would have cognitive problems” (112-13).      

As I have read and analyzed the interview transcripts of the women in my study, I have been impressed by the sophistication of their vocabularies and the complexity of their ideas. The little girls who were fascinated with the power of language have matured into women for whom language matters a great deal. Perhaps their verbal facility has also helped to delay cognitive decline.

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Literacy does not occur in a vacuum. As young girls, Kay, Irene, Blanche, and Anna internalized the beliefs of those in their immediate social and familial worlds. The message was clear: reading and writing were an important part of being a successful person. Far from being only a set of skills, literacy represented values that were passed down in—and mostly out of—school. As Anna put it, “Everybody read.” For these women, the literacies that were encouraged in their early years aligned closely with the literacies practiced and rewarded in school. Kay, who, as a young girl, began to keep a notebook of memorable quotations. Irene, who along with her older sister, started a school for the neighborhood children. Blanche, who watched her mother with a book in one hand as she dusted the furniture with the other. And Anna, whose mother created a kind of home school for her own children after she was forced to give up her teaching career. Clearly, too, all four had certain inborn cognitive qualities that equipped them to benefit from the literacy opportunities available to them. None of them had learning disabilities that would have made learning to read or write unduly difficult. And fortunately for them, these were ways of being in the world that lasted into old age. At the time of our interviews, all of the women were still able to engage actively with reading and writing.

 

Looking back, we see that, for these women, literacy is part of a lifelong narrative. As they grew older, they used reading and writing as resources to enrich their lives in ways that directly related to the habits and values established in childhood and practiced over a lifetime. In this section, I will look again at each of the women and identify literacy themes that have run throughout their lives and that help to explain how reading and writing have been powerful influences on their ability to age well.

 

Literacy Within Community: Anna and Blanche
For Anna, a theme that runs throughout her literacy narrative is the key role of literacy sponsors. Defined by Deborah Brandt as “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (“Sponsors” 166), literacy sponsors have been especially important influences in Anna’s life. As the only one of the women who was born and raised in Plainfield, Anna had limited opportunities for advancement in this rural community. Female literacy sponsors were instrumental in her selection for various positions, both paid and unpaid, within the town.

The earliest and most influential of these literacy sponsors was her mother. Forced to retire from teaching because of her marriage, Anna’s mother eagerly embraced the role of literacy sponsor for her children. Another significant literacy sponsor was her Sunday school teacher from the age of three onward, a woman who also served as the town librarian for many years. Anna worked under this woman’s tutelage as assistant librarian, and when she died at the library desk at the age of ninety-seven, she had made it clear to the authorities in Boston that Anna should be her successor. A few years later, when the town postmaster decided to retire, she too had designated her assistant, Anna, to be her replacement.

As Brandt’s research on literacy sponsors has demonstrated, literacy helped many people in the twentieth century to improve their economic and social status, and this has definitely been true for Anna. However, her life has also been enriched in other, intangible ways by her love of reading and writing. Now, in retirement, Anna has become an important literacy sponsor herself. As treasurer and official distributor of the Plainfield Post, she assures that this biweekly newsletter, an essential source of town news (even in this digital age), is never late to arrive in residents’ mailboxes. As a retired librarian, she is always on the lookout for books and articles that might be of interest to others and has an almost uncanny knack for knowing who would be interested in reading what. She is often seen at town events with a book or magazine in her hands, ready to pass it on to the right person. As if to demonstrate her continuing role as literacy sponsor, Anna brought several items of interest to our meeting in April 2018—a letter from her friend in North Carolina, a recent newspaper article about the ongoing influence of mothers, and the first issue of Hilltown Life, a glossy magazine focused on “the beauty and vitality” as well as “the challenges and opportunities” of life in the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts (Perkins 4). Having gained so much from literacy sponsors earlier in her life, Anna now takes satisfaction in serving as literacy sponsor for her friends and neighbors.

For Blanche, strong religious faith and the love of music are intertwining themes that run throughout her literacy narrative. In our April 2018 meeting, both Blanche and Anna mentioned that they practice daily Bible devotions. Blanche owns a number of versions of the Bible and likes to compare the nuances of the different translations, to which she is especially sensitive because of her bilingual background. Religious faith and regular Bible reading (or listening on CDs) were important for several of the participants in Suzanne Kesler Rumsey’s study of literacy in older adults. As Rumsey observes, “By ‘practicing’ or engaging their spirits through literate acts, they are able to hold on to what is most important in their lives” (“Holding” 89). Rumsey’s study as well as my own reveal that, for many elders, literacy is a way of supporting and strengthening their spiritual lives.

Throughout her life, Blanche’s involvement with religion and music have often taken place within community, an important source of connection and self-worth since she did not work in a compensated job during most of her adult life. Blanche was active in church organizations, which involved many literacy activities such as planning programs, writing reports, and giving speeches. While living in Long Island, she belonged to her church’s women’s fellowship and taught Sunday school. She was also very active in a national Christian organization, serving as music chairman and prayer chairman for a number of years. After moving to Plainfield full time, she continued this type of involvement, serving as president of Plainfield’s non-denominational Ladies Benevolent Society (LBS) for seven years. Finally she stepped down from this leadership role, explaining that she decided to “let it go to the younger generation. . . . You know, enough is enough.”

Aging well is partially dependent on knowing when to let go, and Blanche had a good sense of when to move on. But moving on doesn’t mean abandoning the sources of literacy that had sustained her in the past. Even now, as a woman in her hundredth year (as she is fond of pointing out), Blanche remains active in community and religious organizations, attending church almost every week as well as monthly meetings of the LBS and weekly sessions of the church-sponsored reading and discussion group. She also regularly joins younger friends who take her to live broadcasts of Metropolitan Opera performances. Blanche’s involvement with music and religion have provided a strong sense of self-worth and identity throughout her life and continue to sustain her in old age.

 

Rejection of Computer Technology
The one area where all four women felt excluded from literacy was technology—computers and new media. Their refusal to use computers wasn’t just a passive reluctance but rather a clear decision not to engage with this new form of literacy. It was significant that each woman readily identified computers as the most important change in recent years. For example, in 2007, when I asked Kay to talk about important changes she had seen in her lifetime, she answered without hesitation: “Oh, I think the biggest change is this dotcom stuff. . . . And it’s getting bigger [said with emphasis]. I just read something about a young kid who’s twenty-three who’s developed something that’s called Facebook. You know, to me, it has no virtue of any kind. Does it?” I went on to talk about the power of the new technology, and how there are good and bad sides to it. Kay continued, “They said it’s going to change the world. . . . I wonder how it will change the social life of people. How is it going to change their culture?”

Like Kay, Blanche expressed reservations about the new technology:

I feel that I’m out of the mainstream. . . . It’s a little bit frustrating. Not being able to understand. On the other hand, I don’t know that I want to. It would be wonderful to send an email. Somebody will write me a note or a Christmas card and say, “Send me your email so we can correspond.” Well, I don’t have email. So it’s a little frustrating. . . . Things are happening at such a rapid pace that it’s almost impossible to keep things in sequence. We’re bombarded from the radio, we’re bombarded from the TV. All of these terrible tragedies. Things come to your mind that are pretty stressful. And the rapidity of all of this.

She went on to talk about “this new Apple thing”—the iPad.

It’s revealing of the continued active involvement of Kay and Blanche that even though they themselves didn’t use computers, they were aware of recent technology breakthroughs shortly after they came into existence: For Kay, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and, for Blanche, the Apple iPad.

Anna, ten years younger than Blanche, is also resistant to computer technology. She explained that she managed to retire from her jobs as postmaster and librarian just as these occupations were becoming more computerized. When we spoke in 2011, she mentioned that her daughter and son-in-law were buying a new computer and wanted to give her their old one, but she had rejected the offer. “I have fat thumbs,” she said. “I can’t deal with all those little keys.”

In her ongoing work on literacy and technology in later life, Lauren Marshall Bowen highlights the tendency in writing studies research to stereotype older people as uncomfortable and inexperienced with digital technologies (“Beyond Repair”; “Resisting”). She has worked to draw attention to elders who are successfully using technology for their own purposes, a trend that will become increasingly important as the century advances. For the women in my study, however, despite their impressive literacies in other areas, the digital world evoked their fears and suspicions, and they chose not to engage with this new type of literacy. In effect, they decided to “alienate themselves from the changes” in literacy tools, one of the options Rumsey describes in “Heritage Literacy” (575-76). These women, so flexible and up to date in other areas, opted not to update their skills with regard to computer technology.

Instead, they developed other ways of coping. For example, Anna devised a low-tech workaround for not being able to enjoy the instant communication of email. As the former town postmaster, she had relied on the US mail as a key link with the outside world all her life. In the cold and snowy winter of 2018, when she was eighty-nine years old, she made it a point to venture out to the mailbox in front of her house each morning with a letter or bill, raise the red flag for mail pickup, and, when the flag was lowered, go back to check for new mail. Clearly not as convenient as sending a quick email, these trips to the mailbox had several advantages. They encouraged her to write something every day, enabled her to communicate regularly with older friends who didn’t use computers, and provided daily doses of fresh air and exercise.

Blanche’s solution was to make the most of the telephone—a breakthrough technology in her youth. Having given up driving in her early nineties, Blanche relied on the phone to maintain close contact with her friends and relatives. Speaking personally, I can confirm that receiving a phone call or voice mail from Blanche is like having a face-to-face visit. The warmth and caring in her voice come right through the phone line in a way that no text or email can ever equal.

Although none of the women in my study are computer literate, this has been a conscious choice on their part. They prefer to rely on the communication technologies that served them well in the past.

 

Differing Views of Themselves as Readers and Writers
Although most of the literacy experiences the women recalled as meaningful occurred outside of school, the educational opportunities available to them as young women have shaped their uses of literacy in later life. All four women were intellectually inclined and would clearly have benefitted from a college education. But primarily because of family economic circumstances aggravated by the Depression of the 1930s, only two, Irene and Kay, were able to achieve that goal. Both of Irene’s parents were college graduates, and they were determined that their children would get a college education. Kay’s family was the most prosperous of the four. Her college-educated father was working in a management position with an income that enabled him to send both daughters to college despite the hard economic times. Blanche and Anna were not so fortunate. As a child of immigrants, Blanche took the commercial course in high school and had to find a job after graduating. Anna’s parents were making ends meet with their small farm, but college for their children was a luxury beyond their means.

This educational history may help to explain the different ways the women have used writing in their later lives. Anna and Blanche saw writing as a useful skill for accomplishing certain tasks of daily life, but they did not regard themselves as “writers.” In contrast, Kay and Irene, the two college-educated women, went beyond these everyday uses of writing in an effort to explore ideas and communicate in the wider world outside their immediate social circle.

 The women’s different uses of writing reflect a trend in twentieth-century literacy. In “Remembering Writing, Remembering Reading,” published in 1994, Brandt makes the point that for most of her interviewees' reading seemed to have a higher and more universal status than writing as they looked back on their earlier lives:

On the whole it must be said that the status of writing in everyday literacy practices is decidedly more ambiguous and conflicted in comparison to reading. . . . [W]riting seems to be experienced more as an embedded means than a demarcated end in itself. Writing does not seem to be as broadly sponsored and endorsed by parents; nor does the identity “writer” seem as unproblematically available as the identity “reader.” (470)⁶

This generalization held true for Blanche and Anna. While they were eager to talk about themselves as readers, they did not regard themselves as writers in a creative or aesthetic sense. It’s important to point out, however, that reading, like writing, is a form of meaning-making and, as such, can be of great value for older adults. In her landmark book, The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, Louise M. Rosenblatt called attention to the ways in which readers actively create what she called “the poem” as they read poetry, a novel, or even a piece of informative nonfiction. Readers construct the meaning of what they read, and these meanings differ at different times of life. Thus, an active reading life remains a significant way of making meaning in the elder years as it was for the women in this study, one of the keys to their continued involvement and vitality.

When I asked about the role of writing, Blanche and Anna initially thought I was talking about penmanship, a skill that was stressed in their early educations. Both did go on to talk about letter writing as an important life skill. For example, in the past few years Anna has been exchanging long, informative, and carefully composed letters with a dear friend and neighbor who moved out of town to live near one of her children. These letters not only serve as a way of staying in touch but also provide a means for Anna to think reflectively on subjects of her own choosing. She often encloses a clipping she thinks would be of interest to her friend with a note written in the margin, “What do you think of this?”

Letters also play an important role in Blanche’s life. She mentioned listening to a radio program focused on “the lost art of writing letters.” Speaking with great emotion, she said, “It’s so sad because once the emails are erased the record is gone. You have no record of these beautiful letters like Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote back and forth, these beautiful things that are on paper.” Like the famous poets, Blanche and her fiancé (who later became her husband) exchanged letters: “I still have his old letters upstairs.” They are among her most treasured possessions.

Like many of the people Brandt interviewed (“Remembering”; Literacy), Anna and Blanche were fully literate and used writing as needed in their daily lives. But they did not view themselves as writers. Irene and Kay, on the other hand, used writing not only for instrumental purposes but also for aesthetic reasons and as a way of asserting their agency in the world.

 

Writing for a Wider Audience: Irene and Kay
Throughout their adult lives, Irene and Kay had used writing as a way of reaching out to a world beyond the local community. As they grew older, writing became even more important as a way of formulating and expressing their views. At a time of life when activities such as participating in a political demonstration or attending a lecture had become difficult, writing provided a way to stay actively involved in the wider world.

A theme that runs throughout Irene’s literacy experiences from the school years through old age is writing as a public act. Chosen as class poet at age sixteen, Irene continued to have a way with words throughout her life. In fact, her facility with writing helped to pay for her college education. As Brandt points out, in the twentieth century media sources such as magazines or television programs promoted literacy by sponsoring contests (“Sponsors” 166-67). It was through one such competition, an essay contest sponsored by the Birmingham News, that Irene won a full scholarship for the first and last years of college.⁷ During her career as an opera singer, Irene continued to use her writing in the public sphere, writing program notes and professional bios for her singing engagements. Much later in her life, Irene engaged in another form of public writing, composing letters to elected officials. As she told me in an interview, about a year after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, she wrote a letter of concern to then President George W. Bush, criticizing his war policies. She had hoped to receive a reply from the President but instead got only form letters requesting donations. After Irene’s death in May 2016, her sons found a copy of this letter among her papers and decided to read it at her memorial service. To them, it exemplified an important character trait: their mother’s belief that, as a citizen in a democracy, she had a right and a responsibility to express her opinion to the highest public official. And she saw writing as a way of doing this.

For Kay, a fascination with history, which was sparked during her season in Paris as a young woman, provided a theme for writing in later life. When she and her husband retired in 1977, she devised a project that would combine three of her lifelong interests: writing, visual design, and history. After a three-week road trip tracing the travels of her paternal grandfather, who had been a bugler in the Civil War, she produced a book that included copies of his writings (his diary and sixteen letters) along with her narrative of his travels during the war. Kay had the complete document photocopied and bound—an important piece of family (and national) history.

Another type of writing that is often especially meaningful in old age is the life review. In 1999, when a “writing group for seniors” was offered in neighboring Cummington, Massachusetts, both Irene and Kay decided to participate. In Beyond Nostalgia: Aging and Life-Story Writing, Ruth Ray, a gerontologist and writing studies scholar, theorizes the value of this kind of writing in later life, drawing upon her own experiences as a participant-observer in eight different senior writing groups over a three-year period. In the book’s introduction, she explains her rationale for taking a narrative approach to this subject:

From my position as a feminist, life stories are rich examples of gender negotiations; they are language acts that make visible the different ways men and women “write the self” in old age. They also illustrate the different paths of development available to men and women across the life course. (27)

Looking back on one’s life, using words to make meaning of the past, is an important task at any time of life, but is especially significant in old age (see also Jerome Bruner, 110-36, for a discussion of the construction of the self in autobiography).

But if people do not see themselves as writers, as seemed to be the case for Blanche and Anna, they may feel intimidated by the thought of joining a writing group. Even Kay, never one to shy away from new or challenging situations, had some hesitation before eventually signing up. She expressed these reservations in a handwritten metacognitive reflection, which she later attached to her copy of the group’s photocopied publication:

Somehow, somewhere it was suggested to me, there would be a creative writing course to attend in Cummington. I felt that I am not a candidate for writing and thus dismissed the idea. However, the word creative kept recurring in the recesses of my mind. When the offer to take advantage of this Tuesday morning event was again mentioned, I thought, “Why not?” It’s been a general habit of mine to venture into new or different experiences.

According to Ray (22-26), the communal aspect of writing workshops for elders is of key importance as the “self” is constructed in dialogue with others (either real or imagined). The facilitator of the Cummington group, Wynne Busby, emphasized this in introducing the group’s publication: “I am grateful for the richness of the stories we have told each other, . . . and for the warmth of our little community during these ten weeks. There was commonality, laughter, a few tears as someone touched a nerve now and then” (n.p.). Kay and Irene each had three pieces in the group’s publication.⁸ In these personal reflections, the women explored memories of their childhood and analyzed turning points in their lives as adults. Like many other elders, Kay and Irene benefited from this opportunity to reflect on people and experiences from the past, using words to make meaning in old age within a supportive community.

Perhaps the confidence Kay gained through sharing her writing with others in this workshop was a factor in her decision, at age ninety, to begin a series of reflective writings in which she worked to express what aging had meant in her life. This decision was typical for Kay, who throughout her long life felt the need to work things out for herself and not just rely on accepted wisdom. In one of our interviews, Kay explained:

I don’t know why, but I had the feeling that . . . for some reason I wasn’t born to know all of this stuff the other kids seemed to know. And then I thought, “Oh, well. So what? I’ll make it out on my own.” And I think that idea has stuck with me the rest of my whole life, that I’m responsible.

Many years later, Kay applied this same attitude to understanding the meaning of aging. Written over a period of nearly ten years and shared with many friends in the community, these writings constitute a valuable archive of aging—reflections on what it means to grow old from someone in the midst of the process. In this way, Kay was working actively to make meaning in—and of—old age.

In the first of these pieces, Kay uses a metaphor she would invoke many times as she describes ending up “somehow on the other side of the ‘Looking Glass’ where I had never been before. From there, there would be no return.” In “Ode to Aging,” written in 2006, when she was ninety-three, she expresses the sense of “drifting” or “floundering” into a new time of life (see Figure 2). She finds this “last phase” to be one of “a grand awareness.” The next year, still grappling with her own mortality, she writes: “How I wish the knowledge in one’s brain, especially of great importance would survive after death. How can it pass into oblivion?” These reflections, written at the end of her life, were one way Kay hoped to pass along the knowledge she had gained. The deepest, most philosophical of these writings is a poem entitled “Motion Is not Stationary,” composed in 2007 and influenced by her reading of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Einstein. In this poem she shares understandings that had evolved over the course of her life.

Fig. 2: Kay’s “Ode to Aging”

 

The last of Kay’s writings on aging, composed in 2011, when she was ninety-eight, reflects her basic optimism tempered by the realization that “Old Age is busy now, showing off its inordinate skills.” This reflection was originally written as a prose piece, but a friend, herself a poet, encouraged Kay to reformat it as a poem and publish it in the local newspaper, the Plainfield Post.⁹

While others in her age group may feel silenced by society’s negative view of old people, Kay Metcalfe, as she became one of the “oldest old,” decided to share her perspective on aging with others in this series of writings. At a time when she was struggling with hearing loss, which greatly interfered with oral communication, Kay used writing to transmit to others the essence of what she had learned from living. This was a task she took extremely seriously, revising many times as she struggled to express her thoughts on this most profound of subjects. As Kay grappled with old age, her literacy, honed since childhood, enabled her to broaden what she could accomplish at a time of life when many others retreat into silence.

As the proportion of elders in the world population grows dramatically,¹⁰ it is important to recognize the role that literacy can play in aging well (Beal). The type of reflective writing that Kay did during her nineties has great potential as a way of coping with the challenges of aging. Composing a narrative is a way of organizing complex, often disturbing, occurrences into a coherent whole, a way of bringing structure and meaning to life experiences (Pennebaker and Seagal, 1250). Experimental studies conducted over many years and with many different subject populations have found a direct correlation between writing about (and analyzing) traumatic events and improved physical and psychological health (see, for example, Pennebaker, Opening Up, “Writing About,” Writing to Heal; Pennebaker and Seagal).

For Kay, using writing to reflect on what it means to grow old was a way of doing the kind of mental processing that geriatric psychiatrist Gene Cohen feels is an important task in the years after seventy. At this time of life, people “feel more urgently the desire to find larger meaning in the story of their lives through a process of review, summarizing, and giving back. . . . [W]e begin to experience ourselves as ‘keepers of the culture’ and often want to contribute to others more of whatever wisdom and wealth we may have accumulated” (75-76).

Partly as a result of her writings about aging, Kay was seen by many in Plainfield as a positive role model. In 2012 she received the “Gold-Headed Cane,” awarded to the town’s oldest resident. After her death in 2018, the selectmen (the town’s governing board) decided to dedicate the town’s annual report to her memory. They asked me to write the dedication, and I used this opportunity to quote from her reflective writings on aging.

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Making Meaning Across the Lifespan

In her book Ageing, Insight and Wisdom: Meaning and Practice across the Lifecourse, Ricca Edmondson stresses the importance of meaning making within the context of a person’s entire life: “To neglect this aspect of lives, bitterly misrepresents them: making meaning is a socially and existentially significant activity” (15). She emphasizes the need for society to focus more on the ways that people make meaning in old age and less on how they are (or are not) contributing to the economy (197-205). Recognizing the strengths and resources of our elders counteracts the common tendency within gerontology and society at large to focus on the frailties and illnesses of old age. Considering how older people use reading and writing to construct meaning is one important way of focusing on growth and development rather than decline.

Now, more than ten years after beginning my study, I have learned a great deal about the role of literacy in aging well by looking closely at the lives and experiences of four remarkable women. As I reflect on what I have learned, I think about Irene writing a letter critiquing the foreign policy of President George W. Bush. I think about Anna walking out to her mailbox, hoping for a letter from her friend. I think about Blanche, who, at age ninety-nine, still reads from the Bible every day and regularly attends a church-sponsored reading and discussion group. And I think about Kay, who, over a ten-year period, used her own reflective writing to explore what it means to enter the land of the oldest old. For these women, reading and writing are part of a continuing narrative, providing a way of relating to the world and making meaning at a time of life when other activities may no longer be possible.

As I conclude this discussion of literacy across the lifespan, I keep remembering something Irene said in our 2007 interview:

I love words. I think words are fascinating. . . . You know, I love that chapter in the book of John: “In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God.” You know, it says He spoke the worlds into being. He said, “Let there be light. And there was light.” Words have a power beyond almost anything that we know of.

With her belief in the power of words, Irene could have been speaking for all four of the women. A lifelong fascination with words has been an important factor in their ability to age with grace and resourcefulness. For these women, active engagement with reading and writing has taken on a particular power in the elder years as they use words to make meaning of their lives.

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I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the four women who participated in this study. I offer heartfelt thanks as well to Lauren Marshall Bowen and Suzanne Kesler Rumsey, editors of this special issue of Literacy in Composition Studies, for their thoughtful and detailed responses to earlier drafts of this article.

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