As outlined in the introduction, feminist scholars have noted the “feminization
of education”
and its implication for women’s equality and children’s
learning. Recent scholarship considers women’s relationships with educational
institutions from a variety of angles, including the gendered biases in institutional
discourses of mothering and schooling (David, 1998; Dehli, 1994; Standing, 1999),
the deconstruction of mothering as pedagogic work (Polakow, 1993; Walkerdine
& Lucey, 1989), and ethnographic and historical accounts that complicate
the ideal of a harmonious relationship between women’s literacy practices
and the educational outcomes of her children (Horsman, 1990; Luttrell, 1997;
Rockhill, 1991). More recently, scholars have drawn attention to the gendered
biases embedded in family literacy programming and policies (Mace, 1998; Hutchison,
2000; Pitt, 2000). These diverse perspectives on the links between mothering
and literacy are considered in this final section of the chapter, for the insights
this research brings to a discursive framework for analyzing literacy advice.
The dependence of universal public schooling upon women’s domestic and
pedagogic labour is well documented as a historical process with its roots in
capitalism and industrialization. For example, Dehli (1994) argued that the
“feminization of pedagogy”
has its roots in the institutional relationships
between schooling, mothering, state formation, and the emerging consumer market
for children and middle-class families. In the early Twentieth Century in Canada,
women were recruited as Kindergarten teachers because of their “essential
capacities for mothering and particularly on their unlimited capacity for empathy
and love”
(p. 201). The discourses of this Froebelian “pedagogy
of love”
and the naturalization of women, whether or not they were biological
mothers, as best suited to provide this ideal form of pedagogy, spilled over
into social welfare, public health, and the consumer market in ways that regulated,
albeit using different strategies, the mothering of working-class and middle-class
women. As Delhi (1994) described:
Kindergartens comprised a discourse that was linked into state educational bureaucracies to middle-class social reformers and to voluntary women’s organizations. At the same time, this discourse organized and articulated particular positions for women — primarily as maternal teacher of the very young, and attributed a range of meanings and characteristic to the category “woman” — loving, empathetic, patient, nurturing, self-sacrificing passive, virtuous and moral –– all of which distinguished “her”. (Delhi, 1994, p. 206)