This thesis thus contributes a gendered analysis of the assumptions upon which literacy and schooling policies in North America are founded and their implications for mothering work. Without this lens, policies can continue to build upon and reproduce inequalities, not just in the domestic work expected of differently situated mothers, but in the economic choices that mothers face as they negotiate responsibilities for their children’s literacy and learning with the demands of paid work outside the home. As children’s literacy success becomes associated with their long-term academic achievement, these responsibilities increase and take on new urgency. Finally, in mapping a stronger understanding of the discourses that legitimize institutional practices and public policies related to mothering and literacy, this study provides a basis for further research documenting women’s lived experiences as their child’s first and most important educators. It thus begins to address an area of feminist research on gender and education largely overlooked until now.
The interest and focus of the study is the discursive strategies that normalize and connect ideal mothering to ideal literacy. The genealogy of the ideal of the mother as teacher of literacy explored in the study informs the analysis of literacy advice to mothers in the Twentieth Century. Because the focus of this study is literacy advice discourses as they are produced and reproduced in texts, this thesis also does not describe the rich forms of literacy that take place in homes and community settings, or the diverse ways in which women, fathers, caregivers, and families, including children themselves, may or may not take up mainstream literacy advice. However, as described in Chapter Two, where possible, the study documents the ways in which parents may negotiate literacy advice texts in their written and oral interactions with popular magazines, computer listserv discussions, public forums, and in their writing in adult literacy classes.
Chapter Two elaborates upon the research methods and analytic lenses of post-structural feminist theory and new literacy studies that inform this study, and considers the ways in which these come together in a Foucauldian-inspired approach to critical discourse analysis. Chapter Three explores research and practice trends in the field of literacy studies and feminist research on mothering that informs a framework and method for analyzing literacy advice discourses. Chapter Four presents a genealogy of the concept of the “mother as teacher of literacy.” The purpose of this chapter is to foreground the analysis of literacy advice texts in the remainder of the thesis by exploring the Foucauldian-inspired question — what is the history of contemporary literacy advice discourses?