• That mothers are teachers of their children, in a pedagogic sense, was presented as common sense.
• Mothers’ roles as “their child’s first teacher” was not considered work, but rather rendered invisible by embedding literacy in “everyday routines” associated with women’s work.
• Certain disciplinary technologies (Foucault, 1995) were at work in literacy advice texts. For example, the regulation of domestic time and space, and of women and children’s bodies in the performance of “ideal” reading practices in the home.
• Story book reading was privileged over other literacy practices.
• The “habitus” of the ideal Anglo-Saxon middle-class mother was privileged. These “ideal mothers” were connected to the “ideal children” they were to raise through the performance of ideal literacy practices, in particular story book reading.
• There was, however, complete invisibility of the different material conditions in which North American women do the work of mothering and in which children are raised.

These themes prompted another question: If I am able to discern patterns across a wide variety of seemingly unrelated literacy advice texts and policy statements, what common discursive formations and strategies do these texts share? Where does this advice come from? Attempting to answer these questions involved looking for evidence of inter-relationships among discourses, and shaped the decision to investigate literacy advice discourses from a historical perspective.

Look for evidence of inter-relationship among discourses

The above questions prompted an examination of the existing scholarship on child-raising advice and mothering (presented in Chapter Three) as well as an analysis of literacy advice to mothers in the Nineteenth Century (presented in Chapter Four). These investigations involved both inter-textual and intra-textual analyses as texts were compared to others across time, and within similar time periods, across different genres, and against statements within a single text. Through this analysis, the themes identified in the pilot study were organized into three main categories, identified as dominant discursive formations associated with literacy advice. These are: intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the “normal” family. The features of these discourses and categories for analysis are defined in the context of the analysis of child-raising advice in Chapter Three.