The Utility of Calling Themselves Unreading Mothers:

An Analysis of the Practice of a Rural Parent-Teacher Association Mothers' Book Club in the 1960s

Abstract

In the 1960s, around 60,000 women belonged to Nagano's Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) Mothers' Book Club. It is interesting that so many rural women participated in a book club. The purpose of this research is to examine what reading was like for the book club members, and how it was related to their positions and abilities. I used ethnomethodology to clarify the practices of members in the Mothers' Book Club, and focused especially on how they showed and shared their “reading” experiences in the book club. Careful reading of the handmade booklets they compiled revealed the following three points related to the members' “reading” concept. First, they tried to read to “catch up with the times.” However, they thought that catching up with times was a mission not only for mothers, but also for all the people who lived in the same period. Second, they tried to read without giving up their roles as rural women. It was not easy to engage in reading activities without sacrificing housework and farm work. However, ironically, a shared sense of this difficulty led them to build a tremendous sense of camaraderie. Third, they got the opportunity to be freed not only from being rural women but also from being mothers through the book club's own way of “reading”. They shared the idea that “reading” activities were practice getting out of the obligations of rural women. In addition, by considering that they were at the bottom of the changing society, they could justify giving more effort to “reading” than to taking care of their children. These agreements allowed them to realize the opportunity to engage in the activity of “reading”, and the members enjoyed it.