Nietzsche described genealogy as a “history of the present.” It entails beginning with a concept or issue of contemporary concern and tracing back through its various constructions over time. As Gale (2001) explained, a genealogy is concerned with understanding how a particular concept or belief comes to be perceived as a “truth” or a “problem” in the first place (p. 385). As described in Chapter Two, the genealogical approach is associated with Foucault who used it in his History of Sexuality (1978). That study has come to be regarded as a classic example of a discourse analytic approach to historical meaning-making, wherein Foucault sought to reveal the social conflicts and power relations that produced notions of sexuality, and indeed the regulation of sexuality over time. Foucault borrowed the term genealogy from Nietzsche, and came to link the genealogical approach to his original “archeological” method of “excavating” historical shifts in language use to reveal the power and interests that underpin them.

A genealogy is not concerned with uncovering the truth or discovering “what really happened.” It is a surface, rather than an in-depth investigation, one interested in how power/knowledge link up to produce discourses, rather than in providing an exhaustive account of the progress of history as a “plan unfolding.” Similarly, my aim in this chapter is not to provide an exhaustive account of the historical construction of mothers-as-teachers (although such a study would certainly fill a gap in the literature on mothering and education), but rather to conduct a surface reading of advice texts in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries in order to generate more refined categories and more complex understandings of the power/knowledge/discourse relationship as they relate to contemporary literacy advice discourses.

My point of entry into this investigation is the discursive categories suggested by the historiography of child-raising advice presented in Chapter Three. I position a literacy lens at the centre of discourses of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family to explore what insights into literacy advice this can reveal. The data for this chapter are drawn from advice texts written for mothers in Britain, the United States, and Canada, in the Victorian and early Edwardian eras.