Quaint as they now seem, Dick and Jane's influence was staggering. By 1946, it was reported in a trade journal that Dick and Jane readers were being used in more than 50 percent of all American schools,¹ and by 1960 they were in use in 85 percent.² Moreover, they were widely imitated. For all its popularity and influence, however, the world of Dick and Jane--though it was presented as the norm--did not reflect the lives of the majority of American children. In 1972, in Princeton, New Jersey, an independent group of 25 women from various disciplines calling themselves Women on Words & Images (WWI) published Dick and Jane As Victims: Sex Stereotyping in Children's Readers, a meticulous study of these and other children's readers. In the 134 books that were used in the WWI study, only three working mothers were depicted, though the United States Office of Labor Statistics for 1969, for example, showed that nearly 40 percent of all working women had school-age children.³

The Dick and Jane method as an empirical educational model was not without its critics. In 1965, educator Arthur S. Trace, Jr. published Reading Without Dick and Jane, which explicitly outlined the inherent problems with this look-say reading system and demonstrated how, in effect, the "programmed retardation"⁴ of the method had spawned a nation with limited comprehension skills due to the flatness and one-dimensionality of its basic learning tools. The repetition of a prescribed number of words strung together into uninspiring narratives could not provide an adequate educational foundation, according to Trace.

In addition, the readers reinforced existing gender inequalities. Relying on carefully compiled statistics, the WWI study outlined the inequity portrayed between male and female characters, both adult and juvenile. Stories featuring boys outnumbered stories featuring girls 5:2. Biographies of famous males outnumhered biographies of famous women 6:1.⁵ There were even twice as many male animal as female animal stories. Excerpts from two Scott, Foresman readers define the gender roles plainly: "'It's easy. Even I can do it. And you know how stupid I am' [said by a girl]; ⁶ 'Oh, no,' I said. 'It is no secret. We are willing to share our great thoughts with mankind. However, you happen to be a girl.' Smart Annabelle flipped her eyelashes at me. 'Come on, Albert,' she said. But Albert stood still. 'Excuse me,' he said. 'I think I will stay and learn to build an Electro-Thinker.'"⁷

Even before the WWI study, in 1965, Scott, Foresman responded to the changing times and complaints that the representations in the readers were too homogenous and introduced its "multiethnic"series,⁸ which incorporated 32 nationalities into old and new stories. It is interesting to note how Scott, Foresman integrated the stories. Among the first black characters introduced were Mike, Pam, and Penny. Mike initially appears in Now We Read on the hard cover and title page with his back to the viewer, his unarticulated face in semi-profile.⁹ All three show for the first time on page 24 in the story "Tim." "Tim," however, appeared untitled in 1962 in the primer Sally, Dick and Jane, which featured those three characters. The same drawings and text were used, but, where possible, a white character was removed and a black character inserted in its place. It is interesting to note that Mike does not replace the male character, Dick, but rather the "weaker" female character, Jane, implicitly drawing a parallel between the two as Mike assumes Jane's role. Nothing else was altered. The publisher's rationale was that black children were essentially no different from white ones and thus could be simply substituted in a Dick-and-Jane scenario without any loss of credibility. The absurdity of this is revealed, however, if you replace Dick with a black boy and attach the caption "Run, Mike, run." In that context, even these simple words are not without highly loaded cultural significance; one cannot help but speculate: Run from what? From whom? In examining the "multi-ethnic" readers, other ethnicities fared slightly better; they are shown in some way representing and sharing a unique aspect of their culture. In "Soo-Pung Measures Up," for example, from the reader More Roads to Follow, Chinese people are depicted celebrating the Chinese New Year at a parade.¹⁰ But the same cannot be said of black characters. They too were of a distinct race, but they seemed to have no distinct culture that could be of interest to a diversified readership. By 1965, blacks were not unfamiliar enough to be exotics, but they could also not be easily excluded. As the rendering of Mike on the cover suggests, however, they might be easier for the majority of readers to digest if they are faceless and nonconfrontational.

Today Scott, Foresman is being touted in some camps for being the first publisher to take that multiethnic approach in children's readers. But that credit is hard to understand; how, for example, could Scott, Foresman--headquartered in the city of Chicago, the terminus of the greatest wave of African American migration this country has ever seen¹¹--take thirty five years to include representations of black people in their readers, and even then deny them their cultural distinctiveness? It was a classic case of too little, too late. Social and educational advancements had bypassed Dick and Jane. The readers ceased publication that same year; by 1971, they had been entirely phased out of use in American schools. Dick and Jane had stayed too long at the fair.

When Clarissa Sligh began her explorations in 1988 of family, sexual, and class politics, she did not have a Dick and Jane reader in front of her.¹² What she did have, though, was the antithesis to her own childhood. The language of her text is easily reconstructed from the readers. Though most of Sligh's phrases appear to be, word for word, the actual text of one Dick and Jane story or another, she has, in fact, cut and pasted the dialogue from memory.

Sligh's first completed print was entitled "Played with Jane." The text reads:

The overt sexual referent of the boy's name cannot be ignored. The word "dick" is such an instantly recognizable slang for penis that in reading Sligh's work it is difficult not to snicker first at the ease with which it is adapted and then be taken aback by its obviousness. Apparently, when the series was begun, nicknames were not desirable. To keep the words as simple as possible, several other complete boy's names could have been selected, but Dick, and thus a nickname, prevailed.¹³ Nicknames are to proper names what slang is to regular vocabulary: joky, familiar, a little lazy and altogether personal. Dimunition is implicit; being knockoffs, essentially nicknames are intended to be less formal and less respectful than their full-dress originals--though not necessarily less potent. By extension, in Sligh's work the character of Dick has likewise gotten too familiar, too personal, and actually disrespectful. When Sligh repeats "Dick played with Jane. Jane played with Dick," the sexual double entendre is evident. The careful narrative sequence of Sligh's language further establishes the setup, calling to mind the whole sexual power play--girl seeks inclusion, boy concedes, boy lets girl in, boy checks girl out, boy plays with girl, girl is forced to play along.

Below the text there is a photograph of four black children, three boys and one girl. They are standing outside, side by side, holding hands. Cartoon bubbles ascend from each of the children to a sketchily drawn image of Jane on a scooter and Dick playing with Spot, the scene a middle-class leisure fantasy. The lines "Dick played with Jane. Jane played with Dick." repeat down the sheet, in between the thought bubbles, framing the children, enveloping them, weighing on them. The children are cut out from a snapshot, so that much of their actual environment is obliterated and negated, though there is just enough left of the snapshot to bind the children inextricably to their own world and one another. Superimposed over the entire image is a raw, red circle, a centerless bulls-eye, which targets not only the children but their prescribed desires, their aspirations to the Dick-and-Jane life that is not their reality.

The repetition and layout of Sligh's text are reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's film of the Stephen King novel The Shining, of the scene where Shelley Duvall's character discovers that her husband, played by Jack Nicholson, has not been writing the novel for which he had supposedly been sequestering himself. She breaks into his study and goes to the manuscript, stacked tidily next to the typewriter. There is the neatly typed title page. But all he has written, during those long winter months, is the phrase, over and over, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." As she turns over each page, the neat, evenly spaced typing goes out of control, spaces are skipped, words are misspelled; indeed, the words on the page, his loss of order, eerily mirror the character's descent into madness. Likewise, in Sligh's work, the realization creeps in and sneaks up on the viewer. When taken in its entirety the chill is to the bone. The very simplicity of the language, meant to be easy enough for a child to learn, is cruelly derisive in the grown-up context. The repetition of it, therefore, becomes a kind of slow torture from which there is no escape--it penetrates the viewer because the more you see it, though you can read its literal meaning, you cannot help but register what is implied, that something unspeakable is being masked, covered up, the looming specter of play turned sinister.

It is difficult--if not impossible--these days to read a Dick and Jane primer with an innocent eye. In fact, Sligh's text is more innocuous than is some of what actually appeared in the books. Witness the following excerpts from the 1956 edition of The New We Come and Go, from the first story, "Come":

The fact that any of these passages could be believable dialogue from some assembly-line porno movie begs the chicken-and-the-egg question. Is our contemporary sexual slang a parody of our Dick-and-Jane education, or was such role-playing built into the learning method? The dialogue, when taken literally, is so banal that it is almost impossible to conceive of it as a valuable reading lesson for anyone. Sligh's work takes full advantage of the ambiguity of the stilted language to confront the unexamined acceptance of the past as an entirely positive, innocent experience.

Also in 1988, Sligh made a group of Van Dyke prints entitled Refraining the Past . Once again, she juxtaposed family snapshots with hand written, Dick-and-Jane-style text. In one image, the text reads:

Unlike the writing in "Played with Jane," which was looser, a kind of quick, scrawled printing, this is very carefully handwritten in precisely measured block letters--controlled, tense, structured, near-perfect. We discover the story has escalated when we find inserted, in that scrawly penmanship, the decidedly unambiguous "THEN ONE DAY HER BIG BROTHER SAID, 'TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS AND LAY ON TOP OF ME.'" It is written very small, almost unnoticeable at first glance in the densely speckled patterning that borders the central image, a close-up photograph of sperm-like seedlings sprouting. Floating in that space are two figures: a young male smiling, posed, cocksure with his thumb tucked in his waistband, hips thrust out, left arm resting casually on the shoulder of the female next to him, his hand easily touching her breast. But her body has been removed from the picture, cut out, gone blank, represented only by crudely drawn breasts and a hairless pubic area; the "woman" is a child. Her right hand rests stiffly uncomfortably on his crotch, but her face, that of the young Clarissa, is left intact. She is stone-faced, but Sligh does not obfuscate her identity because this is not some horrible fiction--there is a real victim who at the very least demands the dignity to face us and, by association, her accused. The steadiness of her presence, of her outward gaze, is developed into a recurring character Sligh has called the "witness figure." Sketchily drawn, based on a photograph of Sligh's sister, she is silent, still, vigilant, haunting, a constant of conscience, and ultimately a healing force within the work. The witness figure also appears in Reading Dick and Jane With Me, but in this work she is a clothed young girl.

Of significant influence on Sligh is the work of the late Jo Spence, the British photographer/sociologist who pioneered the discipline of phototherapy. In her own work, in particular work in collaboration with Rosy Martin, Spence explored the family dynamic in a similar vein through photographic restagings of those unpicturesque realities missing from the traditional family album. Spence writes:

Sligh, using photographs of her own family, restages the photo album snapshots by placing them in a different, altered context. What you are looking at, what you see in the photograph alone cannot convey the true nature of the relationships between the people pictured. On their own, they are unable even to hint at the horror that Sligh is divulging. By the same token, the loaded words are intensified by their juxtaposition with photographs of children, with their symbolization of innocence. Though we are expected to be extremely uncomfortable with this pairing, it is telling that we are not surprised by it.

As a child, Sligh was the keeper of the family album; in its assemblage, she was conscious of projecting for herself a positive image of a black family, however false, because she was unable to find that reinforcement in any other printed source--not the newspapers, and certainly not her school reader.¹⁷ With this work, Sligh constructs an alternative family album. The early prints and Reframing the Past are concerned with this interaction between the children filtered through the lens of the learned-structure manual, a surrogate for society in general, which has alienated them.

Sligh's 1989 book, Reading Dick and Jane With Me, is more specifically about the children and their relationships to the socio-economic world displayed in the readers. In several of the images, the text begins large across the top of the page, diminishing in size as it descends. The first two images are crudely drawn sketches of Dick, Jane, and Spot, and Sally and Puff. The images dominate the page; the text, "Dick and Jane and Spot" and "Sally and Puff," exists to identify and frame the children. In the next three pairings, snapshots of Clarissa and her siblings and classmates are used. The witness figure alone holds the left-hand page, while on the right the much smaller photographs of the children intrude upon the plane of text as they both hover in it and are derided by it; the text is not about or for them, and they know it. Moreover, the white children are protected from the text visually by various framing devices, while the black children rest right upon it; words bore into their heads and their bodies, allowing them no defense, no protective shield.

On the following pages, however, a change begins. The witness figure and a boy, presumably Dick, exist for the first time on the page together; while the boy occupies a kind of real space standing against the proverbial white picket fence, the witness figure hangs in the text-sky above and to the right of him. "Go up up up Up up up" is presumably directed by Dick at the airplane overhead, but is also directed by Sligh at the witness figure. The facing page sets up what is to come next. The black children, each representing a window in a schoolhouse building, speak for the first time in their own words: "Come to our school; we go up too." This power shift climaxes in the centerfold spread, where the reunited group of black children on the right-hand page glares out, chaotic, scrawled text above and below them. Written faintly under the Dick-and-Jane text "See.it.go.up" is the sentence "We don't talk like that but we try to read it anyhow." The punctuated repetition of the Dick-and-Jane words is like the rhythmic, singsong scolding accompanying that everlasting whipping, that I-told-you-not-to-do-that-why-do you-defy-me, methodical, mechanical, deliberate, measured speech, numbing in its familiarity and yet nevertheless stinging as each blow finds its mark. The left edge of the page dissolves into the facing page, where a bewildered-looking Jane or Sally, still protected by an invisible halo of privilege, stands alone amidst a sea of neatly typewritten words: "See it go See it go up." Jane or Sally gazes up toward the witness figure, who seems to be commandeering the uprising of self-declaration on the right--Go, black children, go.

We begin to feel this shift more intensely in the next pairing (figure 8), where a grim Sally Dick, and Jane are running. They are less articulated now than ever before, with a blank background, the word "run" chasing them, branding them. The black children have now each been individuated by a bold, double- lined border, become protected, safe, as they chase out the oppression in the guise of Dick and Jane, the characters who have brought it to them. On the next page, the black children are given more voice to articulate their perspective, while the white children have been put back on their page, in their book, the witness figure standing over them, firm, making sure they stay in their self-contained world; she is ready to shut the book if necessary.

Yet, even in their empowerment, the black children remain locked into their reality. Sligh abandons the Dick-and-Jane speak to address the content of the books. The next image contains the repeated statement: "You play in your good clothes every page. We must keep ours nice for Sunday school days." The truth of this statement is a simple distinction that instantly points up the great class chasm between the children being given the readers and the fictional subjects of them. Like the old classroom punishment of having to write your penance over and over again on the chalkboard, so Sligh's text mocks these three sweet-faced children in their Sunday best. Their "penance" for their difference, for their economic status, is the repeated exposure to these unattainable "norms" through the culturally sanctioned use of the texts as the basis for their learning. Like words in the readers, Sligh also repeats the images over and over in the series, a play on the notion put forth by the original Dick and Jane material that reinforcement through repetition will inevitably drive the point home.

With autobiographical work, it has long been my suspicion that photographers employ fiction as easily believably and readily as any novelist. In 1989, the photographer David Keating constructed an extraordinary photo/text series, We Look at a Situation, about his mother's alcoholism. Framed sheets of typewritten text tell the saga of the alcoholic's life; period-framed sepia blowups of attractive, upper-middle-class people accompany each panel. Highly descriptive and gracefully written, the text's analytical detachment, a distanced but acute observation--even the series title claims a controlled neutrality--lends the quality of fiction to the story.

In fact, the subject wrote the text about herself for a never-completed term paper in psychology and Keating discovered it. Except for the presentation, the manuscript, like the photographs, has been left unaltered; increasingly sloppy typographical errors mirror the disease's progress, while the photographic story remains consistently pretty and groomed. Keating's refusal to neaten up the situation leaves the viewer displaced and uneasy. It is unsettling to have to define these attractive people by the plain and graphic text. It is, in fact, impossible to get a handle on the photographer's relationship to them; they seem like found pictures to which Keating applied a separate story. Therein lies the work's strength--the easy adaptability of loaded words to photographs that had virtually no power to convey such a story on their own, to be so direct, and yet still leave ambiguity and doubt.

Sligh's work, on the other hand, is unmistakably true, undeniably real. The photographer's hand is all over it, and it is impossible to separate her from the work. Sligh speaks from the child's point of view: honest, unadulterated (literally)--or so we like to believe. Told from this perspective, it is impossible to think of the story as fiction. What's more, the child does not fully comprehend what is happening to her. That is when the simplistic language serves Sligh best; inherent in such language is the inability to say more than the most basic, monosyllabic statement, or to choose words too carefully because the vocabulary simply is not at hand. One of the big selling points/chief complaints about the Dick and Jane readers was the stingy amount of new vocabulary allowed the student with each level of advancement (contributors to the readers were severely restricted in how many new words per page could be introduced). In a similar way Sligh's child has her hands tied by her lack of implements to confront what is happening to her.

As a further component of the work, Sligh traveled large cyanotype prints of some of the images from the Reading Dick and Jane With Me series, inviting viewers in the galleries to add their commentary in crayon directly on the pieces. Tellingly, more often the response of the viewer was visual rather than verbal; always, the photographic image is worked over, sometimes embellished, sometimes negated. Often the responses are juvenile, seemingly unrelated, that kind of silly "Kilroy was here"-type marking, the nervous response to being challenged to declare one's presence.

Though the readers themselves are no longer in use, the names Dick and Jane have become euphemisms for Mr. and Mrs. Joe Q. Public, a kind of late-20^th century Everyman and -woman. Virtually every day we are witness to some parody of Dick-and-Jane speak--it is so much a part of our culture now that it is taken for granted. This instant recognizability is what allows Sligh's work to strike our collective nerve. In 1994, the Richmond, Virgina, public library and the Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences in Peoria, Illinois, each mounted exhibitions, titled "The Story of Dick and Jane" and "Dick and Jane: Illustrations of an American Education," respectively, celebrating the Dick and Jane series and its contribution--more, it seems, to a marketable nostalgia and Americana rather than our educational system. Both exhibitions are available and expected to travel. The small brochure that the Richmond library published to accompany the exhibition included a Dick-and-Jane-speak sendup on feminism and civil rights as the assassins of the cherished vision of family:

1. James Keeline. "Dick and Jane Textbooks Published by Scott, Foresman," (San Diego: Prince and Pauper Bookstore, 1994), front page of unpaginated pamphlet.

2. "The Story of Dick and Jane," (Richmond, Virginia: Richmond Public Library, 1994), unpaginated.

3. Women at Work (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Publications, 1969); comparative tables cited in Dick and Jane as Victims: Sex Stereotyping in Children's Readers, (Princeton, New Jersey: Women on Words & Images, 1972), p. 26.

4. Arthur S. Trace. Reading Without Dick and Jane, (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1965), pp. 30-58.

5. Dick and Jane As Victims, p. 6.

6. Helen Robinson, ed., More Roads to Follow, (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1965), p. 24; cited in Dick and Jane as Victims, p. 46.

7. Helen Robinson, et al., eds., Ventures, (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1965), p. 42; cited in Dick and Jane as Victims, p. 46.

8. The term "multi-ethnic" was chosen from the Democratic Convention nomination speech by Lyndon B. Johnson; he refers to the United States as a 'multi-ethnic nation." From the documentary film, Whatever Happened to Dick and Jane?, produced and directed by David Thompson (Peoria, Illinois: 47 Teleproductions, 1994).

9. Helen Robinson, et al., Now We Read, (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1965).

10. "Soo-Pung Measures Up," in More Roads to Follow, pp. 60-67.

11. Nicholas Lehmann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).

12. Sligh's memory was triggered by the discovery at a garage sale of a Dick and Jane imitator, Play with Us, published in 1949 by Lyons and Carnahan. Aside from character names, this second-level pre-primer is indistinguishable from the Scott, Foresman product.

13. Thompson, Whatever Happened to Dick and Jane?

14. Various authors, The New We Come and Go, (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1956), pp. 4-5, 8, and 36.

15. Jo Spence, Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography, (Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1988), pp. 82-83.

16. Ibid., p.136.

17. Deborah Willis, "Clarissa Sligh," Aperture, no. 138 (Winter 1995), p. 4.

18. "The Story of Dick and Jane."