Thus, part of the work of attending to issues of representation in documentary research is to be careful to contextualize the work of people and organizations within the broader rubric of the social values of the era and the gender and class discourses they took for granted. As Palokow (1998) argued, it is also important to consider that not all forms of discipline, surveillance, or regulation were nefarious, and many families benefited from literacy interventions that provided them with resources they would not otherwise have had access to. The characters that appeared in these advice texts cannot speak back to my analysis in the same way as an interview respondent can; indeed many of the central figures in the most prominent texts analyzed have since passed away.

This suggests the importance of placing the work of social commentators, advisors, and experts in a context that allows more, rather than less, latitude for interpretation on the part of the reader. I attempted this by often quoting extensive sections of texts so that readers could draw their own interpretations. I also tried as much as possible to describe the discursive context in which literacy advice could be interpreted, often relying upon the existing scholarship of feminist and social historians to do so. However, the work of this discourse analysis involved constructing identities for authors that they themselves may not recognize. This suggests that although Foucault’s earlier work sought to separate texts from their authors, and while the findings of this study certainly suggest that discourses are normed across institutional and inter-textual relationships in ways that place the primacy of the author into question, in practice people’s identities are invested in the texts they produce, and these identities must be treated with sensitivity.

In summary, although the findings of this study suggest that literacy advice to mothers is shaped by continuity in mothering discourses, there were variations in the themes and strategies associated with literacy advice. Indeed, discourse formations associated with intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family intersected and moved back and forth across time, taking on new meanings and speaking to new themes. The analytic methods of constant comparison, substitution, and multi-vocal analysis adopted in this thesis made it possible to de-link advice from its claims to truth and allowed for new readings of contemporary texts based on the analysis of earlier texts, but also from new readings of these texts from the perspective of contemporary struggles over mothering and literacy connections. The following section expands upon the discursive strategies and themes identified in this analysis.