Literacy is at the basis of educational progress and the eradication of illiteracy among women is seen as one of the prerequisites of human development. Moreover, functional literacy needs in the modern world are high when we talk about literacy now, we need to include the capacity to access scientific and technological knowledge. Academic success is mediated through literacy and usually results in positions of power within society. From this position, the written word can be used to influence others' behaviour and attitudes, to direct economic measures and justify political decisions.

At present it tends to be men who control knowledge and how it is used, very often with the effect of disempowering women further. This collection seeks to explore the ways in which women and literacy intersect with power and the forms of struggle women can use to redress the imbalance. It aims to be accessible and relevant to women and men across the world who are involved in aspects of education, gender studies and social action.

Literacy is linked to power in several ways.

The abstraction process involved in learning to read itself enables the individual to develop a 'critical consciousness' with which to review the world and one's place in it. The written word provides us with the opportunity to learn, and act upon others' ideas - to reflect, argue, reject, and develop new ideas. Literacy gives access to information about those aspects of life that affect us and through this and the reflective process, the means to act upon the world itself, the means to implement change (see Freire, 1972).

The potential of literacy at the personal level lies in the development of self-identity, in social and emotional adjustment, in happiness and enjoyment. At the philosophical level, it has the potential for re-presenting reality, for exploring truth and moral values. The political potential derives not only from the process of liberation in literacy itself, but also from the end products: that, is, the knowledge and skills to influence change through direct action, through participation in decision making, through writing ourselves.

The relationship between women, literacy and power can be examined under the three social macro functions of literacy: identification, conservation and construction (see Council of Europe, 1977). Each of these reflects inequalities between men and women.

Literacy enables us to record information.

Women have been traditionally denied access to literacy; therefore it is men who have been the main recorders and our records are gendered. For example, those women who did become literate, learned, renowned - even published - writers in their own time, have largely been overlooked by history or had their contributions belittled. Uncovering their contributions and cataloguing them is one task of present day women writers, scholars and publishers.

Even today, the collection, analysis and interpretation of information tends to be the responsibility of men and it has only recently been recognised that we need to include women as a separate group in statistics, to consider them specifically in diagnostic research, in order to reflect our situation and compare it with that of the male 'norm'.

With reference to different aspects of literacy itself, this function has increasingly been used to highlight the inequalities between women and men. In many parts of the world the rate of female illiteracy is still much higher than for men. This is particularly a cause for concern with regard to developing countries. Women play an essential role in aspects such as health, sanitation, child care, nutrition, farming (particularly growing food for the family) but if they can't read they are directly excluded from relevant information, which is provided in the written form, and thus usually from ownership of the means of production. Indirectly, they are excluded from playing a part in decision making also because of their lower level of education.

However, access to literacy and education does not necessarily mean that women have yet managed to access power on the wider scale. While there is compulsory education for both sexes until 16 in many societies, young women still have lower aspirations than men as regards careers to aim for, still enter sex stereotyped occupations, remain at lower levels within the hierarchy and earn less money.

Across the world there are still relatively few women in top management or in public decision making positions. This is despite the statistics which show girls actually do better in public examinations overall (see Malik et al, 1994).

Girls develop initial literacy earlier than boys and they read more than boys through childhood. Reading habits are gendered even at this stage, with girls enjoying fiction and boys preferring non- fiction. Girls' performance still far outstrips that of boys in language examinations despite a common curriculum for all (see Daniel, 1994).

Thus, while literacy is a necessary means to power it is not a sufficient one. In fact, now that girls have access to the written word through schooling, language and literature have lost the status they once enjoyed, being designated 'girls' subjects', while science and technology have become the routes through which boys gain employment, status and control.

Conservation relates to the functions of literacy in providing historical continuity and social cohesion. Because literacy has been until recently the privilege of groups in power, the continuity provided has been for, and by, men rather than for, and by, women. The cohesive function has been to support the patriarchical status quo, its structures its attitudes and its representations.

The result of this has been a lack of conservation as far as women are concerned. Not only are the contributions of prominent women omitted from history and the works of women writers out of print, but women at all are silent or invisible. Alice Walker talks in particular about the need for uncovering the lives and histories of black women - even in novels by black writers, the women are 'yellow' (the term used for the lighter skin resulting from interbreeding between black women and white slave owners - skin colour being closely related to power and class) (see Walker, 1984). Daughters must go searching for their mothers , although women down the years have made the attempt to catalogue their lives, through poems, diaries and autobiographies, unpublished or discarded.

Because we do not have an established historical record, there has been a lack of cohesion between women. Women have been divided by patriarchical images of the world, and these divisions still prevail - black from white, heterosexual from lesbian.

Workshops, where women explore writing about women, for women and with women, have been one method of addressing this separation from each other. The lack of cohesion and continuity for women which has affected our sense of identity and belonging - our self-esteem - undermines the personal potential of literacy for us. Both the philosophical and political potentialities - women able and willing to work together to bring about change - are largely dependent on this.

Naturally, the withholding of literacy for so long from oppressed groups - the poor, slaves, women - was justified by the threat that power would pose to the status quo. Now, in countries where most people can read, the potential of mass literacy to effect social and political change has largely been subverted by writers who work to conserve the patriarchical system.

The majority of reading material used in school is still written by men and features male protagonists - the so-called canon of great literature. Girls reading fiction are presented with a male view of the world and thus confirmed in a subordinate role in society. Early reading books still feature the Princess who gets her man and the Wicked Stepmother greedy for power as the only choice of models for female behaviour.

Modern adult reading matter continues to reflect and promote this bias, with the help of the tabloids, by gendered magazines (including pornography) and book series and by advertising. While women's magazines do provide women with reading directed at them, they tend to promote stereotyped images of woman - the homemaker, the carer, the object of desire.

The romance genre reinforces aspirations to heterosexuality and marriage, although it seduces by the illusion that the woman ends up by controlling the man. White middle class aspirations are the predominant model available in this genre (see Radway, 1984).

It is important to note that new technological literacies have not necessarily liberated women either, but merely provide another means by which to differentiate between those that type and those that compose. For example, male managers can work from home, but female secretaries are still expected to be present in the workplace.

Within the academic world, the highest levels of literacy have led to abstraction, the promotion of rationality and objectivity, the tyranny of the pursuit of isolating 'truth'. These masculine modes of thinking and research tend to deny the value of the concrete or the subjective and the possibility of uncertainty as a basis for taking intellectual understanding further. They are modes of operation which increase specialisation and compartmentalisation of knowledge, differentiation and competition between individuals (see Daniel, 1992).

In such ways, literacy serves to maintain the existing power relations within society, characterised by inequality, conflict and nationalism. Thus the negative consequences of literacy affect our personal, philosophical and political lives.

Construction relates to the function of literacy in bringing about social change. Here it is useful to look at the two aspects of literacy; how can women bring about change through our capacity to read? and how can we influence change as writers ourselves?

Literacy, as an integral part of education, is the key to personal and political change. Aid agencies working in Third World countries can provide evidence of how adult literacy programmes for women have increased the women's confidence and resulted in community development. Women, through becoming literate, have had a genuine influence at a local level, setting up small-scale businesses, running community groups, getting finance for agricultural initiatives, and bringing up healthier children (see Bown, 1990).

Similar outcomes of basic education and training projects with working class and ethnic minority women in Europe have been documented. Empowerment comes both from literacy as a process (of learning together, discovering oneself, exploring the world, developing self-esteem) and from the tools which literacy brings (the ability to read 'the small print' in financial transactions, to access health information, to understand the electoral process).

Interestingly, empowerment in the community uses of literacy lies not only in power to benefit the individual but also in the power of the individual to work with others for communal benefit. Thus the results of these projects imply a different social order.

The award-winning Literacy Crusade in Nicaragua (1979-80) is an example of the attempt to implement on a large scale Freire's philosophy of literacy as a liberating and participatory process towards political action. The involvement of women in this process was emphasised and the image of la mujer (woman) in the literacy reader is of a masked fighter in the revolution against dictatorship, holding a gun. Young women made up over half of the volunteer teachers in this first crusade and about two thirds of subsequent brigades working in the countryside despite physical threat from counter revolutionaries (see Daniel, this volume).

Everywhere women have played an important role as teachers in adult education, providing the stimulus and opportunity for many women's projects. Women-only classes have encouraged participants to take their education further and to review their career aspirations. Alternative models of educational provision, such as distance learning and modular courses, can more effectively meet the different needs of women with caring responsibilities. Such initiatives make it possible for women to move into the public sphere and to be involved in decision making.

Women have played a prominent role in preserving minority languages through their involvement in formal and non-formal education, developing materials for pre-school children, teaching and campaigning for language rights. Access to literacy and education through one's first or community language has been made possible due to the particular affinity of women to their locality and their 'mother tongue'. In some cultures this has traditionally been through women's involvement in Bible classes or Sunday Schools, which, for example, enabled women in Wales to preserve the Welsh language during centuries of imposition of English.

In the academic world, women's presence has resulted in various changes. Firstly, women's involvement in literary criticism has been important in developing new perspectives in the analysis of the written word, thus highlighting and challenging the male viewpoint, the patriarchical tradition, the silence of women.

Secondly there has been the development of women's studies which has involved an increasingly cross-disciplinary approach in higher education, collaboration between departments and a consequent breaking down of traditional boundaries of academic specialisation. The feminist perspective has additionally been integrated into such mainstream disciplines as sociology and religious studies, thus potentially transforming 'established knowledge'. 'Feminine' ways of thinking, knowing and doing have also been introduced which place importance on the everyday and the subjective, interactive teaching approaches and consultative management styles (see Peters, this volume).

Literacy equips women with a voice, a means to express herself even if she is not listened to, a record even if it will be forgotten, a creative act that may not be credited, a political action that may not be recognised.

On a personal level, women have tried to break out of the silence, the object mode to which much of literature has consigned them, through writing themselves. The search for authentic identity, the attempt to create their own stories, in place of the male-centred narratives provided, is a process of liberation for women writers and thus an empowerment. The nature of feminine subjectivity - how can it be understood and conveyed? How can women's lives and histories best be recovered? French writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras struggled with these questions (see Rodgers, this volume).

While women writers still struggle to have their work recognised, they still also work under different conditions combining their responsibilities as mothers and homemakers with the writing process - a combination which writers like Turaj (this volume) have found to benefit her writing.

Women's search for new forms of writing, to convey a different view of the world, the creative development of female artists - this has usually been assessed according to the male norm, as inferior, rather than understood according to its own purpose. This has led to women moving into certain genres such as the detective story or science fiction, which - because they are disregarded by the (male) judges of mainstream 'serious' literature - have provided a means of freeing ideas and expression.

Thus in parallel with women as readers finding new ways of interpreting the written word, women writers develop new ways of interpreting the world through writing. Whether it be literary, academic or polemical, women's writing serves as political action, as a liberating and empowering force within society. Women have been responsible for raising conscious-ness about women through philosophical and political analysis as well as in their own prac-tical involvement in change. This has included the recovery of women's history, the history of black women and questions about the position of women within black communities.

In conclusion

Rather than, or as well as, the redistribution of power, all these instances of construction through literacy - at personal, philosophical or political levels - combine towards a redefinition of the nature of power; power which no longer stands for status, control and discrimination, but which represents relationships and respon-sibilities, crossing national and racial

boundaries - the positive use of the reflexive capacity of literacy for empowerment and democratic participation.

Bown, L. 1990, Preparing the future. Women, literacy and development, London: ActionAid.

Daniel, P. 1992, How do we as academic women represent ourselves?, paper presented at the University of Wales Women's Studies Colloquium, Gregynog, July 1992

Daniel, P. 1994, Promoting gender equality in schools, in Aaron, J. et al (eds) Our Sisters' Land. The Changing Identities of Women in Wales, Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

CREDIF, 1977, Writing and Written Materials. Problems of Analysis and Didactic Considerations, Strasbourg:Council of Europe

Freire, P. 1972, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Malik, L., Stie, S. and Harris, D. 1994, The Gender Gap in Higher Education. World Yearbook of Education, London: Kogan Page.

Radway, J. 1984, Women, Patriarchy and Popular Culture, University of North Carolina Press.

United Nation, 1995, The Global Platform for Action from the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, New York: United Nations.

Walker, A. 1984, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Womanist Prose, London: The Women's Press.