Moreover, articles included many examples of ideal middle-class homes that promoted reading, in which siblings rather than mothers played key roles in fostering young children’s interest in reading (Sanders, 1944, p. 117), and in which children could pursue their own reading interests with some independence from adults. Referring to her own son, Bean (1944) wrote, “At four years old he got his own library card and went alone to the library to pick out his own books while I went to the store” (p. 120). Indeed, children could be expected to “look at books” independently at home or with their older siblings when mothers were “busy with their own duties” (Rautman, 1945, p. 21).

Domestic pedagogy tasks thus took the shape of providing and encouraging an atmosphere for the appreciation of books, but not for the direct teaching or encouragement of “real reading.” This was a fine line, and one that in part reflected the value of reading as a cultural performance, embedded in the habitus of middle-class Anglo-Saxon culture, rather than an actual meaning making practice. But this also suggests that literacy advice shifted according to social context: it would indeed be impossible in later years to encourage a four year old to visit a library alone and mothers thus became key partners in this activity. Moreover, in a war time domestic economy, it was perhaps possible for mothers to be “too busy” to read to their children, in ways that they were not able to be in the middle classes of the Nineteenth Century, nor indeed in the 1970s and 1980s, when mothers ideally used domestic tasks as opportunities to impart literacy-related knowledge. Thus, discontinuities in the discourse of intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy may be attributed to a complex interplay of wartime domestic economic realities, nation-building priorities, and cultural and scientific views that regarded children as potentially fragile and emotionally vulnerable — considerations that at the time seemed more pressing than the age at which they learned to read.

Less ambiguous in this advice was the need to articulate home life and school life. Indeed, the connections between domesticity, child-raising, and democracy were made in the publication of Benjamin Spock’s (1946) Baby and Child Care. Spock was a pediatrician and became one of the most popular child-raising experts of the Twentieth Century. In 1946, he sought to ease the concerns of parents in a changing world, and positioned child-raising as a key cultural practice to avoid the evils of fascism and anti-democratic governance, and to stave off the “outside” influences of new forms of media, such as the radio (Spock, 1946). Amid these broader social visions was also the persistent tension over mothers’ domestic literacy management roles. As we will learn in the following section, the place of mothers in regulating children’s reading practices while observing the expert status of teachers, doctors, and other experts became increasingly conflicted.