While Gleason was concerned with psychology’s normalization of the “ideal” Canadian mother and family in the post-war era, Comacchio (1993) focused on the role of the medical profession in early twentieth-century Canada in supplanting the informal support networks and strategies women used to find and share the information they needed to help them to safely birth and raise their children. Comacchio similarly drew on Foucauldian concepts of discourse to document the role of the medical profession in the Canadian governments’ efforts to modernize motherhood, a process she described as the campaign for “scientific motherhood.” Comacchio was particularly interested in the role of maternal education in this process. Her sources included policy documents, correspondence, magazine articles, and scholarly work at the time. She found that one of the key strategies of the campaign for a more scientific approach to motherhood was to construct mothers as para-professionals, assistants to medical doctors in ensuring the healthy development of the nation’s children. Comacchio cited an article in MacLean’s magazine in 1920 describing this strategy: “The professional mother of the advanced type stands to the physician in a relation akin to that of a nurse, not asserting personal opinions opposed to his more extensive knowledge, but trained so thoroughly that she can work in harmony with him” (Comstock in Comacchio, 1993, p. 93). This required a concerted effort to educate mothers, though there was a distinction drawn between the educational needs of middle-class and working-class mothers. Comacchio found:

Physicians charged that ignorance was endemic among Canadian mothers, and that working class mothers and those of immigrant origin were especially ignorant. They were determined that these ‘poor unfortunates’ be uplifted from the mire of ignorance and outmoded custom that they saw as the root of familial and societal disarray. But as a necessary corollary to their efforts for working class mothers, child welfare campaigners had to persuade middle class mothers to take a greater interest in “cultivating” their own children in order to preserve and bolster “better stock”. (1993, p. 13)