Writing Center Journal 1995 web Open Access

Nurturant Ethics and Academic Ideals: Convergence in the Writing Center

Mary Trachsel

Abstract

It may have started for me that day in 1989, at the drugstore counter in Austin, Texas. I was there with my one-year-old sons and my three-year-old daughter. The twins were fussing and squirming in their stroller -one of them had an ear infection, and so we were at the drugstore picking up an antibiotic which I hoped would bring more restful nights to all of us. My daughter, her attention drawn to every colorful display near the counter where we stood, was struggling to free her hand from my grasp. One-handed, I attempted to fill out the insurance form that accompanied the prescription. The pharmacist, observing my difficulty, sympathetically offered to help me with what I had learned to consider the "literacy task" of filling out the form. She took the pen and began reading the questions to me. Name? Address? Home phone number? Work number? At this last question she stopped to survey the four of us. I was pushing the stroller back and forth in a rocking motion, attempting to calm the twins whose wails were beginning to attract the notice of strangers. The pharmacist smiled at me in a knowing and sympathetic way. "I guess that's kind of a silly question, isn't it? With all those children, surely you don't have time to work too!" But in fact I was "working." What the pharmacist didn't realize was that mothering was only, as Arlie Hochschild would say, the "second shift" of my work day.

Journal
Writing Center Journal
Published
1995
DOI
10.7771/2832-9414.1356
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Open Access
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Topics
writing centers literacy studies
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

  1. Bay et al. (2025)
    Creating and Sustaining an Antiracist Pedagogy Group in Technical and Professio…
    Pedagogy
  2. Sicari (2022)
    Hitting a Brick Wall and the Women Who Do the Work: Is This the Same Old Story?
    College Composition and Communication

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