Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

I enna May was born in 1898 on a small dairy farm in south central Wisconsin, eighth of nine children of Norwegian immigrants. She spoke no English when she enrolled at age of seven in a one-room schoolhouse built on land donated to school district by her parents. Although Genna May would eventually go on to complete high school (as one of a graduating class of thirteen) by boarding in a town ten miles from her farm, she started school at a time when Wisconsin required only that young people ages seven to fifteen attend a local grammar school for twelve weeks a year (Landes and Solomon 56). As a student in the grades, as she calls them, Genna May wrote spelling lessons on slates, erasing with a wet cloth to go on to arithmetic lessons. She remembers a home with few books and little paper, and she said she would have had no reason to write as a girl except to compose an occasional story assigned by her teacher. After high school graduation in 1917, she enrolled for several months in a private business college in state capital, just long enough to learn typing and shorthand and win a certificate in penmanship before being placed by college in office of a local business that was manufacturing disinfectants for dairy farms. In 1994, Genna May was using writing to record recipes, balance her checkbook, and send holiday and birthday greetings to family members. Genna May's great-grandson Michael May was born in 1981 in a sprawling suburb east of Wisconsin's state capital. In early 1990s he was attending a middle school equipped with computers. The first of four children in his family, Michael remembered that his earliest composing occurred at two years old, when

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