In a critique of post-structural discourse analyses, Polakow argued that while studies in this vein may be successful in revealing the workings of the state in regulating mothers, they may also lack an appreciation for social context and “the existential tissue of poor women’s lives” (Polakow, 1993, p. 104). Citing family historian Linda Gordon, Polakow (1993) argued, “while social welfare intervention was a regulatory form of control, it also gave poor women forms of access to regulatory power over men who abused them and abandoned their families” (1993, p. 29). Polakow thus raised an epistemological and ethical dimension to the critique of the regulation of mothers in modern psychology and pedagogy. While these institutional regulatory regimes may oppress mothers and reproduce gender inequalities, they may also provide services that immediately benefit women. Indeed, as Dehli has suggested, women are positioned in different ways within such institutional discourses, and may benefit or be repressed by them depending on their social location and their immediate situation. The ways in which women negotiate institutional discourses through the socially-situated practices of mothering and literacy are taken up in feminist perspectives of women’s literacy, described in the next section.

Literacy in women’s lives: social practice perspectives

Feminist educators have documented the powerful and conflicting role of literacy in the lives of women, particularly low income and minority women who were never really meant to seek literacy for themselves. In interviews and through participant observations, Horsman (1990) documented how women struggled for space in their family lives and classrooms to learn literacy and use language in ways that transported them beyond “the everyday” and their roles and responsibilities as mothers, wives, and workers. This work challenged the view that women experience their roles and responsibilities for mentoring their children’s literacy, and running the home, as harmonious and natural. Moreover, in her provocative article “Literacy as Threat/Desire,” Rockhill (1991) documented the sometimes violent conflicts women in her study experienced as their families, employers, and husbands opposed the shifting power dynamics that resulted when women decided to improve their literacy skills. Conflict in relations arose when these wives and mothers connected with other women, grew in confidence, and discovered new literacy practices that conflicted with their roles as wives and mothers. Women’s struggles to participate in literacy classes is perhaps an extension of, and resistance to, the long history of efforts to regulate, professionalize, and organize mothering in ways that meet a range of social, economic, and political objectives other than women’s rights to what Mace called “literacy for themselves” (Mace, 1998).