This step refers to attending to how the discourses of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family are kept in place and circulated through literacy advice. Here, I looked for ways in which both mothering practices and literacy practices were compared, distinguished, and/or divided. This analysis provided insights into the forms of mothering and literacy that are normalized, and those that are excluded.
The strategies of substitution described earlier proved useful in identifying issues, ideas, and social contexts that were unaccounted for in advice texts. I also looked for inherent contradictions in advice which often suggested silences.
The analytic strategy of multi-vocality was useful in identifying resistance and counter-discourses in advice. For example, much literacy advice from the 1950s onward encouraged families to spurn TV, movies and other pursuits deemed to interfere with literacy, to make more time for the more culturally desirable practice of family story reading. The persistence of discourses of literacy that emphasize family reading suggests that indeed this may not have been the central practice of the ideal family it was deemed to be. This also suggests the difficulty many mothers and families have in inhabiting these discourses, a point made by Flint (1993) in her history titled The Woman Reader. Flint showed that in the Nineteenth Century, women’s reading was considered dangerous, as it disrupted the discourses of morality and femininity that idealized the compliant wife and mother who had no need for learning beyond fulfilling the needs of her family. And yet the large volume of advice warning against the dangers of women’s reading suggests that the practice was in fact widespread and desirable to women. Women not only negotiated a place for themselves within the dominant discourses of femininity, but also actively resisted these discourses in choosing to be readers and writers. Thus, attending to the practices that advice texts attempt to counter, as well as what they explicitly encourage, provides insights to the ways in which mothers, fathers, and children negotiate “ideal” literacy and “ideal” mothering.