The data used in this study represent but one small window into a diverse
and complex set of practices and experiences. As mentioned earlier, Mechling
(1995) highlighted the need for skepticism in what the data arising from analyses
of child-raising advice texts can reveal about mothering practices. He argued
that there is evidence of large discrepancies between mothering practices and
the advice they receive (p. 44), and indeed “no persuasive evidence to
suggest that official advice affects the parents’ actual behaviour”
(p. 45). Advice to parents says much more about the people and institutions
that generated advice than about the people who may read it. While this creates
difficulties for historians wishing to reconstruct parenting practices of the
past through child-raising advice texts, it does not impede an investigation
of child-raising advice as discourses of dominance that shape “what counts”
as literacy and mothering in particular historical and social contexts, or in
light of the discussion of multi-vocality, how advice texts may reflect trends
in mothering, if only in their attempts to counter them.
In other areas of this study, skepticism over the explanatory potential of the data precipitated the pursuit of the question that kept coming up as I began to appreciate the regularity and uniformity of literacy advice in contemporary texts: where does this advice come from? While this study is able to answer this question in new ways, based upon new sources of evidence, these answers remain partial and tentative in the face of the non-discursive breadth of mothering experience that could not form part of the data.
This study is not concerned with the development of the “mother as teacher of literacy” as a teleological process, unfolding over time, but in the interplay of knowledge, relations of power, and social contexts that shape literacy advice discourses and the strategies and effects associated with them. I have tried to use conceptual and analytic tools lightly, as footprints tracking the discursive strategies and effects of literacy advice to mothers, rather than as heavy boots “stamping” arguments into place. In this way, this approach to genealogical analysis attempts to shape an argument and at the same time allow literacy advice to speak directly to their readers and for readers to bring to these texts their own subjectivities and interpretations to the data. Chapter Three consists of an analysis of feminist research on mothering, schooling, and child-raising, and of literacy research related to women and families; attends to the connections and tensions between these bodies of research; and concludes by identifying discursive formations and strategies that suggest a promising framework for the analysis of literacy advice in subsequent chapters.