A central finding in this thesis was that discourses of mothering that included intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family, were enmeshed and integrated with discourses of children’s literacy. Hence mothering discourses and literacy discourses cannot be usefully separated if one is to analyze and counter the practices of power that shape current “regimes of truth” surrounding policy and practice aimed to support children’s early literacy development. Perhaps one of the most surprising and intriguing findings in this study was the continuities in the discourse formations associated with literacy advice over time. One conclusion that can be drawn from this is that literacy advice to mothers, across the breadth of time and space, is but one continuous text with variations in, rather than departures from, the interlocking mothering discourses of intensive mothering, domestic literacy, and the normal family. This calls into question the claim that contemporary family literacy programs represent a “new” and “innovative” approach to fostering children’s literacy acquisition. This study has shown the many ways that contemporary literacy advice is discursively linked to nineteenth-century gender and race theories. The historical weight of images of the Madonna, the ideals of the patriarchal family, and preoccupations with “the other” that manifested itself in Darwinian racism and colonialism can be traced in contemporary literacy advice through a range of discursive strategies and themes.
Discourse strategies that kept intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family in place shifted, and were at times in conflict. As noted above, nineteenth-century literacy ideals strongly shape contemporary literacy and mothering discourses. Women’s domestic literacy work was considered an important part of maintaining social status and fostering appropriate morals and habits in their children, both of which were central to mothering work. This “sacred” maternal duty and responsibility was not only visible but celebrated in advice literature, as Flint (1993) and Robbins (2004), have observed, and is suggested in the analysis in Chapter Four. Yet by the early Twentieth Century, mothers’ roles as “teachers of literacy” became more didactic and pragmatic than “sacred”, as domestic literacy work was oriented to promoting children’s success in school, and to contributing to the development of a “normal personality”, rather than to a spiritually and morally enlightened character.