It was during this time that the image of the father in domestic literacy receded to near invisibility. Whereas literacy advice texts would mention the place of fathers as storybook readers in the home, even if they were “special guests,” this father image disappeared in the 1980s. This is perhaps explained by the wave of media and corporate attention to the crisis of “illiterate mothers.” In a discourse similar in its moral undertones to that of “intergenerational pauperism” described in Chapter Four, in the 1980s, an illiterate mother could pass on, like a disease, illiteracy to her children. An advertisement promoting the right-wing Coors Foundation for Family Literacy stated:

The problem with illiteracy is it’s so contagious. In America, illiteracy is spreading like the worst kind of disease. At least 23% of American women are functionally illiterate. And since women are the primary caretakers of children, the cycle continues to be passed down, from generation to generation. (Coors, 1985)

The crisis surrounding adults, and particularly mothers, who were illiterate became a hot topic in newspapers and magazines in the middle and late 1980s. The “problem” of women’s literacy was presented in the context of its impacts on a mothers’ ability to carry out domestic literacy work. In a 1987 article in Chatelaine, Turpin wrote the confession of her “illiteracy”:

It was discouraging for me to know that Fern [my husband] had to deal with the burden of my illiteracy. Besides doing his job as a health-care worker, he shopped for groceries and did all the budgeting. When the children were small, he read and explained to me the direction for medical care of making formula before he left for work. As the children grew older, Fern read all the notes and report cards they brought home from school. My children were getting an education, and I was happy for them, but I was unhappy that I could not read stories to them or help them with their homework. (Turpin, 1987, p. 196)

It is interesting that Turpin saw the main burden of her illiteracy as her inability to perform the domestic literacy work associated with mothering. Paradoxically, it was the isolation of being a homemaker that prevented Turpin from learning literacy later in her life. When Turpin found a literacy tutor, she described her increasing literacy skills, and her new-found confidence in being able to “write letters and grocery lists, and do my banking.” And so the personal face of this woman who did not learn literacy in her youth presented a complex image of new-found self esteem, a desire for independence, but also a desire to use literacy to meet the expectations of her role as wife and mother.