In her study of family life, history, and social change, Hareven (2000) suggested
that families are active agents in the production of social change rather than
the objects of it. “The family planned, initiated or resisted change;
it did not just respond to it blindly. Historical research over the past two
decades has provided ample evidence to reject stereotypes about the family’s
passivity”
(p. 18). It could be argued through this analysis that the
increase in literacy advice, the narrowing of the perspectives of “what
counted” as valued literacy practices and routes to literacy, and the
imprecation of children’s literacy with intensive mothering practices
suggest that institutions are acquiring more power over domestic literacy strategies
and possibilities. Yet the provision of literacy advice does not equate adherence
to advice, even if it does shape a discursive climate that values some literacy
practices more than others. The fact that literacy advice becomes more insistent
and abundant in the 1990s suggests that people do not in fact adhere to it,
or that it is not having the intended effect. Indeed, it would not be necessary
to advise parents to read to their children if this was a common practice in
all families, and it did indeed lead to educational equality for all.
This study has documented several examples of women who resisted and negotiated discourses that tied their children’s literacy success to their own adherence to intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family. Anne Scott (Chapter Seven) said very clearly that she did not have time to teach her children at home, but that she fully expected that he should be taught to read in school anyway. Women entered the workplace and sought public roles even when advice warned them of the dangers this posed to their children’s learning.
The shifting image of fathers in literacy advice, and domestic literacy work,
are other themes that merits further study. The analysis in Chapter Four suggested
that nineteenth-century fathers were perhaps more implicated in the literacy
lives of their children than much of the literacy advice suggested. Although
most often represented as a “special guest,” advice also suggested,
fathers should be more directly involved in domestic literacy work since they
likely had the literacy skills to read to their children. Indeed, it is possible
and likely that when there was a father and mother in the home, both parents
shared or divided roles and responsibilities with respect to supporting children’s
literacy in ways that have become invisible in literacy advice directed to mothers.
This possibility is supported by the work of Nol (2005) in her study of nineteenth-century
Canadian families. She found that “separate spheres”
were perhaps
not as separate as is often believed, and fathers were involved in child-raising
and many other aspects of what she describes as the intensely social nature
of family life.