It is important to remember, however, that the ideal literacy practices associated with intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy in the 1950s and 1960s were mitigated by social conditions that made it possible, in many Canadian and US communities, for four-year-olds to go off to the library alone, and hence not be placed in a constant supervisory/pedagogic role with their mothers. Moreover, Mrs. Bell’s letter (p. 140), reminds us that mothers negotiated these discourses in the context of their personal lives, their faculties of critical appraisal, and the cultural resources available to them. This underlines the shifting context in which mothering discourses play out in different times and places.

As discussed in Chapter Three, feminist scholars have identified the dependence of schooling upon mothering work. Yet the analysis of advice in this chapter pushes this argument further, suggesting that “ideal” child readers in school settings were dependent upon the extent to which their mothers participated in the discourses of intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy, and indeed the extent to which their families approached “normalcy.” It is here that the spectre is raised that in tying children’s success as readers to the practices of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the “normal” family, advice may have had the effect of normalizing and reproducing not only gender inequality, but also inequalities in children’s literacy achievement. Children whose families did not participate in these mothering discourses may have found themselves at a disadvantage in a schooling system that took the practice of these discourses for granted. I will return to this theme in subsequent chapters. These shifting and contested discourses of the “mother as teacher of literacy” in the context of the women’s movement, and the rise and fall of the social welfare state, form the basis for Chapter Six.