These “lessons” included modeling and monitoring children’s literacy and learning in the home, in ways that were largely dependent on the resources and consumer practices of the emerging middle-class culture and household organization. This included “airy playrooms full of well chosen and durable toys that are close to the library, large kitchens, carefully selected domestic help and lots of windows” (Proudfoot, 1897, p. 32).

This image of the ideal home is instructive for the discursive construction of the normal family and for domestic pedagogy. That the cultural and pedagogic reference point for the ideal early-twentieth-century mother as literacy teacher was rooted in the image of Gertrude, a woman who never actually existed, is a telling example of the ways in which power/knowledge works in these discourses to “form the subjects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1972). The roles of mothers as mentors and monitors of their children’s literacy over the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Centuries seemed to change in the expectations placed upon them, and the broadening scope of their roles, but not in the discursive structures that underpinned the common-sense notion that women were best suited to this work, though in need of close monitoring themselves.

Froebel’s pedagogic movement began to take hold of key social institutions including schools, nurseries, and public health systems. However, Brehony (2000) argued that this movement was not unified, and different schools of Froebelian thought produced different kinds of advice about what and how children should learn to read.⁹ For example, in “Common Sense in the Nursery” (1895), Marion Harland reflected on the “precocious child,” who emerged at the time amidst the perceived increase in nervous conditions among children attributed to their intense scrutiny and stimulation.

Teach a quick-witted, nervous infant little that is not really necessary for him to know until he is five or six years old. He will gain nothing and you well may lose all, by the forcing process. Should his life be spared, he will not be the better scholar at five and twenty for having read fluently at three…lay the foundation of bodily health broad and firmly before beginning to build the superstructure of mental endowments. (Harland, 1895, p. 72)

Other skeptics of the pedagogic movement focused not on mothers’ pedagogic behaviours but on the possibility that children’s literary practices may not coincide with parents’ or society’s ideals:

⁹ For perspectives on a variety of education movements led by middle-class Victorian women, including the Froebelian movement, see: Hirsch, M. & Hilton, M. (2000). Practical visionaries: Women, education and social progress, 1790–1930. London: Pearson Books.