A Home of Her Own: Pedagogy of Social Justice in Freeman’s The Revolt of ‘Mother’

Abstract

This article reads Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's short story, The Revolt of 'Mother', to explore social-justice education. Sarah Penn, protagonist of the story, revolts to turn the new barn into her home that marks her unlearning against the patriarchal episteme. Her challenge to the exclusionary domestic system also anticipates and illuminates the restorative-justice frameworks for pedagogy. To this end, it takes recourse to John Rawls ’Theory of Justice as fairness and Ayer’s teaching toward systemic transformation to bring equity, and Paulo Freire's dialogic pedagogy to argue that Sara’s resistance embodies a pedagogy of unlearning that transcends the banking model of transmitting knowledge. By staging Freeman's text in conversation with the American cultural writing and feminist literary criticism, the article contends that Sarah's revolt equally refers to co-learning, a political claim, and a moral imperative for social inclusion. A close reading of the characters, their dialogues, setting, and key events help further show how the plotline and setting of domestic space not merely mark a site of intersectional confinement but a zone for Sarah’s proximal development: a pedagogical prism in which collaborative learning and the dialogic assertion of agency operate as instruments for structural change Freeman's story provides a richly humanized pedagogical toolkit while advocating for justice against restrictive spaces and affirming learners as active co-producers of knowledge.