With reference to the questions that guided this thesis, it may be concluded from the foregoing analysis that discursive formations associated with the “mother-as-teacher-of literacy” were indeed consistent with intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family. But the strategies that keep these discourses in place — and enable them to work as practices actively shaping literacy advice — shifted, and were often competing and contradictory. For example, guilt and fear were powerful strategies that normalized intensive mothering as a pre-requisite for children’s literacy development: Even if women did not comply with this advice by design or default, they might have felt guilty for not doing so, and afraid of the consequences for their children’s learning. The prevalence of threats and warnings in literacy advice discourses also served as dividing strategies, separating good mothers from bad, thinking citizens from problem readers.
The contradictions and silences in the advice reviewed in this and the previous chapter suggest that, regardless of its empirical base, advice to mothers about children’s literacy was about more than children’s abilities to make and share meaning from texts. Indeed, children’s reading practices were also a lens into mothering abilities, and links between mental health, family bonding, and the project of meeting the “challenges” of public education in a democracy were replete in this advice.
In spite of the different philosophical and theoretical positions, and the
different roles for mothers that advice suggested, there is also continuity
in literacy advice from the Nineteenth and earlier Twentieth Centuries into
the 1960s. This advice normalized mothers as responsible for their children’s
literacy skills, and assumed the “normal family” as a necessary
setting for domestic pedagogy, however defined, to occur. Moreover, although
the increased emphasis placed upon domestic pedagogy in the 1950s, in particular,
signaled recognition that women’s domestic literacy work in the home had
a public impact, there was virtual silence surrounding women’s experiences
of this work and the social context in which that work took place. While the
official goals of mainstream literacy advice were to contribute to democracy
by creating “thinking citizens,” and “intelligent, well-balanced
men and women,” its effects were to normalize and promote the status of
the habitus of middle-class, Anglo-Saxon families. In this way, the “reading
culture crisis” became the “problem of the non-readers.” As
Gleason (1999) noted, it was the deviation of immigrant, working-class, single
parent, Aboriginal and African-Canadian families from the ideals of the normal
family and from the practices of intensive mothering, that labeled them “problem
families”
and children from these families would be labeled as “problem
children”
largely because they were not deemed appropriately “ready
to read.”