This chapter reviewed research that has critically shaped the discursive structures and themes surrounding literacy and mothering that are explored in this study. Taken together, these studies draw attention to the relationships between maternal education and social reform, as evidenced in the reliance upon mothering work to achieve the desired goals of state formation and nation-building through universal public education. The “pedagogy of love” that was deemed to come so naturally to women, was shown to be linked to broader mothering discourse that positioned women as passive observers and managers of their children’s unfolding development, within the context of sensitive mothering and the normal family. We also saw how psychology, in its quest to define and reproduce “normalcy” facilitated the spreading of mothering discourses beyond the confines of schooling into homes, welfare agencies, child care centres and, importantly, the market place of educational and parenting products. And yet the reliance upon women’s work for nation-building goals was not unique to education. The medical profession also relied upon mothers as “para-professionals” to doctors and psychologists to carry out their health regimes in the homes and communities. Women work for schools, but they also work for social reform enterprises of many kinds.
This review also emphasized the importance of attending to the ways in which women have been differently positioned within mothering discourses. Family structures and socio-economic and cultural groups that fell outside the “ideal” middle-class, Anglo-Saxon family were subjected to different and more intense forms of moral regulation and intervention, as a “threat” to the social order. But middle-class mothers were positioned in mothering discourses as key agents in the reproduction of the cultural and social ideals they represent, in ways that also mask their diverse experiences of women as mothers. Chapter Four constitutes the first chapter of data analysis. It pursues the question that emerged from my own “moment in the practice of mothering,” that day in the care with my daughter, and which evolved further in the pilot analysis of contemporary literacy advice described in Chapter Two. Where does literacy advice come from? In pursuing this question from a genealogical perspective, Chapter Four deepens some of the themes identified in the present chapter. These include the structuring of pedagogy as a form of moral regulation, the biologic essentialism that naturalized women’s bodies as natural supporters of children’s literacy, and the increasing identification of the ideal home, with the ideals of the Kindergarten classroom. That chapter also opens up new areas for exploration, including the different positions available to women within literacy advice discourses and the conflicting discourses of literacy as essential, but also dangerous, to the ideals of domesticity.