Threats to the solidarity of the family were said to be everywhere: mothers’ paid employment, marriage breakdown, divorce, and juvenile delinquency. Concern about these threats, whether based on perception or scientific fact, in turn fuelled a more general anxiety over the threat of Russian communism and atomic annihilation at the height of the Cold War. (Gleason, 1999, p. 7)

Gleason’s study, and other feminist histories of the family (see for example, Comacchio, 1993; 1999), contributed deeper appreciation for the diversity of family life and mothering experiences in Canadian history by attending to families, and individuals within families, as embodied subjects. This entailed attention to discursive strategies and multi-vocality, asking of psychological and medical texts: What versions of family life are normalized? How is this normalization accomplished? Who is included/excluded from these definitions of “normal”? What is the effect of this discourse on families’ lived experience and what evidence is there for the ways that readers negotiate/resist these texts? Interrogating texts in this way allowed for the examination of multiple subjectivities embedded in the unitary construct of “the family”. This multi-vocal approach to the analysis of psychological discourses in Gleason’s study makes it possible to talk not just about “family” in a generic (and often hegemonic) sense, but to consider the diverse experiences of many kinds of families, and the often conflicting relationships and experiences among individuals in them. For example, Gleason shows that female-headed Mennonite families, African-Canadian families and First Nations families were constructed by psychology as “outside the norm” of the traditional Canadian family because patriarchal structures in the form of “the head of the household” were not present, or because women worked outside the home, shared parenting, and so on. In this way, discourses of the normal family could be located in the broader discursive contexts of patriarchy and neo-colonialism that had the effect of legitimizing state intervention in, and regulation of, “abnormal” families, as well as the monitoring of families that were deemed “normal.”

Gleason (1999) also argued that one of the discursive effects of psychology is the regulation of mothering. She drew on Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self” to show that such regulation was not only effected through external social controls and state interventions, but also through the ways in which mothers regulated their own practices as they mediated discourses of “normalcy.” Here Gleason (1999) pointed out that, “regulation is not a form of complete social control, but rather like a net; while it may shape experience, it does not exercise total control” (p. 8). This echoes Smith’s view that women are not “passively cowed by texts.” Although mothering discourses may “organize” women’s relationships to schools, they do not determine them.