The patriarch who led the family in family social reading, or indeed provided his family with the resources to pursue their own reading interests in the family parlour, faded into Blatz’ 1929 lament that fathers had all but disappeared from children’s lives in the social discourse of childhood. Fathers in the 1960s and 1970s could be expected to read a story at bedtime and even counsel other fathers on the importance of doing so. But, unless they were writing advice texts, they become invisible in the 1980s and 1990s as literacy educators joined with government to fret over the effects of “welfare moms” and changing family relationships upon the educational outcomes of children in schools. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the effects of the feminization of literacy, as a construct of literacy research and advice, became associated with boys’ lower reading performance in standardized tests, and a new crisis over “boy’s reading.” Father figures, rather than actual fathers, appeared as “role models” for boys’ literacy and it became part of women’s work to involve fathers and other male role models in their children’s lives. Interestingly, everyday fathers didn’t seem to make appealing literacy role models. Boys needed guests even more special than fathers, as hockey and baseball players, boxers, and businessmen paraded across literacy promotional materials.
What are we to make of the finding that literacy advice discourses are a continuous text; that across all these text there are but two or three messages that are “normed” over time and through convention and adherence to mothering discourses? This uniformity of advice (though certainly not uniformity in the ways in which advice texts are mediated and negotiated in local contexts) evokes John Raulston Saul’s observation that when everyone starts convening around a single discourse, parroting it, it is an indication that the discourse has become less, rather than more, powerful (2004). We are, in this sense, in Gramsci’s interregnum, where the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born. But there are glimpses, from within this study, of ways out of the interregnum of the dominant power/knowledge surrounding mother-literacy.
I suggest three possible routes away from mothering discourses in literacy education. The first rests on a critical awareness of the ways in which literacy research contributes to the reproduction of mothering discourses. The second is a commitment to attend to the situated experiences of mothering in contemporary Canada and the United States as a basis for policy making and literacy research. The third is for literacy educators and researchers to reconsider their faith in the role of instruction, of which advice is one form, to address many forms of social inequality, and to rather engage more actively in how literacy education can be placed in the service of more equitable and fair social policies for women. This stands in contrast to making women, and low-income and racialized women in particular, responsible for doing the work of addressing social inequality through literacy instruction and advice. These points are briefly elaborated below.