Mace’s (1998) study aimed to bring feminist and socio-historical lenses to the topic of family literacy. She used an innovative combination of archival analysis and in-depth oral history interviews to problematize gendered and functionalist explanations for the “causes” of low literacy, such as the “intergenerational cycle of illiteracy” (Sticht and McDonald, 1992), which grew in popularity in the 1990s. This concept holds that illiterate — or the currently more-acceptable term “low literate” — mothers are a risk because they raise illiterate children:

The myth that illiterate mothers cause illiterate children has subtly gained ground. The historical evidence, however, poses a challenge to this causal fallacy. Mothers alone, whether literate or not, do not cause their children to grow up illiterate; on the contrary, an adult population of fully functioning members of a literate society includes some who are the progeny of illiterate parents. (Mace, 1998, p. 5)

Mace asked adults who were raised in England in the early and middle periods of the Twentieth Century to write to her about what they remembered of the place of literacy in their mothers’ lives. She conducted follow-up interviews with some of these contributors, and her analysis led to insights about literacy as a socially situated practice, illustrated in this instance through mothers’ multiple experiences of time:

The capacity for reading to take us away from the here and now is one [dimension of time]; the struggle for women to capture the time do that; in the context of other timetables is a second; and the way in which life changes in a lifetime may bring us to different uses of literacy, is a third. (Mace, 1998, p. 34)

The multiple notions of time that Mace used to capture the shifting relationships between mothering and literacy over the life course problematizes the causal links that are often made between mothers’ literacy activities in the home and children’s academic outcomes. Across history, mothers with “little time” for literacy have raised literate children. If mothers are currently expected to make time to read to children daily, support the literacy development of their children in the years before school, and attend to the constant upgrading of their own literacy skills, this prompts a consideration of the underlying social, economic, and political shifts that have taken place that have brought us to such “truths.” Mace spoke to this increase in expectations placed on mothers: