This chapter analyses feminist research on child-raising advice, mothering, and the relationships between mothering and schooling through a “literacy lens.” The aim in this analysis is to look for insights into the discursive strategies linking mothering to teaching and how these insights may inform an analysis of literacy advice in particular. The chapter begins with an analysis of socio-historical and feminist studies of child-raising advice texts. It moves to consider the growing scholarship by feminist sociologists and psychologists on the relationships between mothering and children’s schooling in light of social theories of literacy, which focus on the social construction of mothers and of literacy, within family literacy and early literacy programming and policies. The chapter concludes with a summary of the major discursive categories generated through this analysis and their implication for the analysis of literacy advice in the remainder of the study.
Arnup (1996) asserted that in contrast to common assumptions that changes in mothering advice are linked to scientific progress and new research findings, advice to mothers and motherhood itself is
“a socially constructed and changing phenomenon”(p. 10). In constructing her argument, Arnup pointed out that early twentieth-century advice to mothers to toilet train infants from as early as a few months old reflected the primacy of moral and physical discipline and hygiene in vogue at the time, rather than the physical or intellectual readiness of infants to begin toilet training. Similarly, the discouragement of breastfeeding in North America during the post war era can be linked to a common faith in technological and synthetic approaches to human endeavors. That breastfeeding is currently regarded as essential to normal child development and mother-child bonding is but one example of the changing nature of advice to women. Bringing similar attention to the continuities, but also discontinuities, in literacy advice to mothers promises similar insights in the social construction of literacy advice. To understand the place of child-raising advice in women’s mothering work during the inter-war and post-war years in Canada, Arnup asked,“Why do women turn to experts for advice on prenatal and infant childcare?”(1996, p. 14). She found that contrary to the dominant image of the “natural,” maternal figure, many women in post war industrialized societies simply had not spent a lot of time around young babies and children. As one mother said,“I was so dumb when it came to children”(Arnup, 1996, p. 124).