There are many natural ways in which the child may become familiar with letters, words and a good many phrases and sentences with their meaning. The child will be busy all day long, and this is a sort of business that he likes, for part of the time; and if the mother will only help him a little in these ways, and play with him, he will accumulate a storage of words larger than the school would teach him in the same time, and they are apt to be better learned and more useful ones. (p. 317)

Huey’s pedagogic advice culminated with the warning that there is “too much” of books in the age and that bright children would not need them if mothers followed his methods for reading and intellectual development. His ultimate thesis, that “the secret of it all lies in parents’ reading aloud to and with the child” (p. 332), constituted the reference point for the study of mother-child story book reading practices, and the home as a “natural” environment for learning to read, that came to dominate reading research and family literacy advice in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century (Durkin, 1966; Chall, 1983; Heath, 1983; Sulzby & Teale, 1984). This observation, however, was based on the normalization of intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy in ways associated ideal reading practices with the habitus of the Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, “good mother.” Hall’s (1904) and Huey’s (1909) influential treatises on “natural” reading practices could only be taken up in the context of a North American society in which motherhood and all things associated with the domestic sphere had come to take on a “sacred quality” (Light & Parr, 1983, p. 109), and in which gendered divisions of labour associated with the normal family, made women discursively, if not realistically, available to be the teachers in the home.

While Huey’s careful observations and theories contributed to the scientific bases for child-centred reading instruction, the advice that emerged from his research positioned mothers at the centre of this domestic literacy role, effectively narrowing the “many paths to literacy” (Gregory, Long & Volk, 2005) that were available to children outside of direct mother-child interaction. Sutherland (1976) showed how the lives of the majority of women and children in Canada at the turn of the century bore little resemblance to these idealized domestic literacy settings, whether oriented to a Froebelian Kindergarten home or Key’s “natural” Rousseauian one. Many women worked long hours in factories, as domestic workers, waitresses, and wet nurses — in 1916, 175, 000 women in Ontario were wage earners (Light and Parr, 1983). Many children worked on their family or foster family farms, or as labourers. The connections between their ‘”living and their literacy” (Vincent, 2000) likely did not conform in any real way to the ideals set out in the advice texts and emerging psychological research and advice.