Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman’s pleasure down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself…
And if he once, by shame oppress’d
A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast
And seems to think the sin was hers (Patmore, 1854)
This excerpt from the infamous poem the Angel in the House captured a set of patriarchal discourses surrounding women’s emotional frailty that legitimated women’s assigned responsibility for the emotions and nurturing of others. These responsibilities were recruited for new kinds of literacy practices required by mothers and children with the rapid processes of industrialization, the spread of literacy and the rise of public schooling, with the passing of the Education Act in Britain in 1870, and in Canada between the years 1871 and 1942 (Axelrod, 1997, p. 36).8 Although written in 1854, the Angel in the House entered public consciousness as a maternal ideal on both sides of the Atlantic in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century.
The late 1870s and 1880s marked the emergence of the child as the raw material for nation building, and a shift in the focus of literacy as a tool for the attainment of spiritual perfection to a tool for social reform and new forms of moral regulation (Graff, 1979). This provided the impetus for a second wave of advice literature, which descended upon North American homes in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Comacchio (1993) ascribed the increase in the publication of advice texts to the panic in Canada and the United States for the preservation of Anglo-Saxon values in the context of rapid social change:
8 According to Axelrod (1999) Newfoundland and Quebec did not bring in compulsory school legislation until 1942, although Quebec had one of the highest participation rates in public schooling in the country by 1900.