At the end of the Nineteenth Century, worried observers feared that industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, if left unregulated, might disrupt their comfortable neighbourhoods, and that they would be powerless to protect their Canadian families from what they invariably saw as negative influences. Fears about social degeneration were inflamed by the mass arrival of immigrant families, their high birth rate relative to the decreasing size of Canadian families, and continuing high infant mortality rates. Since women’s roles and identities were rooted in family, the movement of women into paid labour was also shaking society at its core. Perhaps more frightening than the real, material difficulties faced by many Canadian families of this time, therefore, was this sense of foreboding about the collapse of cherished institutions and relations, including the family itself. (p. 48)

The rise of public schooling implied subtle but steady shifts in literacy advice to mothers, from a focus on domestic literacy management for the purposes of children’s moral education and character development to a focus on domestic literacy management in support of school literacy. In a comment signaling a shift from the view of mothers as “natural teachers,” Charlotte Mason (1878), an icon of the contemporary Christian home schooling movement in North America, articulated growing concern for the abilities of mothers to adequately teach their children: “The children are the property of the nation, to be brought up for the nation as is best for the nation, and not according to some whim of the individual parent” (p. 35). As Comacchio (1993) noted, “the developing view was that ‘society’ should decide the standards for effective parenting and a proper home life” (p. 53).

Ideal domestic literacy management roles for the “new century” emerged in the image of the fictitious Gertrude, a creation of early nineteenth-century Italian philosopher Pestalozzi. His Leonard and Gertrude (1781) and How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801) were reprinted and circulated in 1985 and 1894 respectively. It combined reverence of the Madonna, such as that expressed by Buffum (1826) and Sigourney (1838), with domestic and political ideals of “race development” and nationhood that appealed to Darwinist race theorists and social reformers. Pestalozzi emphasized “doing and seeing” as a necessary part of children’s learning, with “Nature” the source of experience upon which to build children’s knowledge and awareness. A principle underpinning this naturalized perspective of learning was that “the development of the individual follows that of the race.” (Pestalozzi, 1894, p. xi)