For this study, texts were selected according to the criteria outlined below and were compared on the basis of the following questions: What are the differences and similarities across these texts? What are the consequences of this? Which understanding of the world is taken for granted and which are not recognized? (Phillip & Jorgensen, 2002, p. 149). The comparisons were completed across and within texts created in a similar time period as well as over the decades covered in the study.
One tool for analyzing discourse from a feminist perspective in this thesis is to substitute the term “mother” for “parent”, or “mother” for “father” and vice versa, where these terms appear in advice texts. This strategy was used by Woollett and Phoenix (1996) in their feminist analysis of child development textbooks in which they found that the interchangeable use of the terms “parent” and “mother” in many literacy research and advice texts, and the accompaniment of these texts with images of mothers reading to children, suggest that in spite of the use of the ubiquitous term “parent” these texts are indeed directed to mothers. This finding has important implications for analysis and interpretation in the present study. Sometimes the intended audience for literacy advice is located through the analysis of inter-textual features of advice pamphlets, promotional materials, child-raising manuals, and so on. The advice can ask “parents” to read to their children everyday, but the accompanying image is one of a mother and child reading a book together, suggesting the advice is directed to mothers. These images were not included in the text of this study even though they provided important clues to the intended audience for the text. But most often, the placement of a text in a magazine subscribed to mainly by women, or in child-raising texts directed to mothers, also provided evidence that the advice was directed to mothers.
However, a layer of analysis in this study did attend to the strategic use
of the terms “mother”, “father”, and “parent”
in every advice text, since a shift in use can indicate a broader discursive
shift in literacy advice. For example, in the analysis of nineteenth-century
texts in this study, it would seem that fathers in many cases were deemed important
and active in the literacy of their children. However, by the 1950s, even though
the generic term “parent” was used more frequently, the representation
of the father as an important agent in children’s literacy development
all but disappeared, only to reappear in a very different context, and within
a different set of discourse strategies, in the 1990s. The conclusions of Woollett
and Phoenix (1996) seem important to keep in mind when substituting “mother”
for “parent” or “father” in this analysis. They pointed
out that, “the apparent gender blindness in the use of the word ‘parent’
appears to be disingenuous, as it serves to maintain traditional gendered divisions
of labour between mothers and fathers”
(1996, p. 82).