Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) recognized the domestic sphere as a vital site where habitus is implicated in social and educational reproduction. It is here that the implications of a literacy habitus are expressed in what Robbins (2004) has termed “domestic literacy work.” According to Robbins, women’s association with the domestic sphere in patriarchal ideology produces the category of “domestic literacy” as the work of mothers that, while invisible as actual labour, is nevertheless central to the cultural reproduction of middle-class literacy practices as institutional ideals. As described above, discourses of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family shape what counts as ideal domestic literacy work, serving to re-affirm and reproduce middle-class literacy habitus as socially ideal. Yet as much as these discourses may regulate domestic literacy practices, they also provide opportunities for differently situated mothers to position themselves within mothering discourses in ways that help them to acquire or maintain their status. The concept of habitus as a lens for analyzing literacy advice is elaborated in Chapter Two.

It is this attention to the interplay between gender, text, and context that aligns studies in the vein of the new literacies to post-structural feminist studies of mothering. Mothering, like literacy, can be understood as both an institutionally-driven ideal and a socially-situated practice. Adrienne Rich (1978) distinguished between the institution of motherhood and the experience of mothering. Her distinction provided feminists with a conceptual tool to identify the often oppressive ideals of the good mother as communicated in the texts of social policy, advice, and popular culture (Arnup, 1996; Luke, 1996), while preserving and honouring the joys and pleasures that are also part of the everyday experiences of mothering.