As Galbraith (1997) has noted, much can be learned about ideals of childhood
held by a society, through their beliefs about children as readers. This chapter
suggests that similar insights may be gained about the ideals for mothering
through beliefs about women as readers. The discursive themes connecting mothering
and literacy in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries reflect the observations
of the “Emulation”
poem that opened this chapter. Women’s
access to literacy and to formal education has long been contingent upon its
usefulness to others, or the perceived threats it creates for those who fear
they “decay” of cherished, patriarchal institutions. Yet as continuous
a theme as this represents in literacy advice to mothers, equally prevalent
is women’s resistance to these contingencies. As persuasive, impassioned,
trendy, or popular as literacy advice texts to mothers may have been, they did
not tell the whole story of women’s literacy practices or educational
interests. Indeed, much could be understood of women’s literacy practices
through the social trends that advice texts did not acknowledge, or that they
actively sought to suppress. For example, the persistent concern over what and
how much mothers read and the possible implications of this for their roles
as mothers suggests that mothers who could read, read frequently for leisure,
for themselves.
The analysis of literacy advice in this chapter was by no means exhaustive, but it nevertheless provided some concrete insights into the questions that guided this chapter, in particular: Where does contemporary literacy advice come from? It also begins to shed light on the questions that guide the present study: What discursive formations are associated with the “mother-as-teacher-of literacy”? What discourse strategies are associated with the normalization of the “mother-as-teacher of literacy” over time? What forms of literacy and of mothering are excluded within these discourses? Who has gained power within the discourses of literacy and mothering?
The analysis of literacy advice in this chapter suggests that images of mothers reading to children, with exhortations on the crucial link between this practice and children’s success in life, did not just appear with the family literacy movement in the 1980s, or with the re-discovery among reading researchers that children learn much about literacy before they start school. Rather, this genealogy of the “mother as teacher of literacy” suggests that literacy advice represents an intersection between shifting ideals of the “good mother” and the ideal literate child, and the discourses of intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family. These discursive formations privileged within the context of the “cult of domesticity” the moral duties of mothers to raise Christian children; this task was indivisible from teaching children to read the Bible and scriptures. The idea that the domestic literacy management roles for upper-class mothers required constant attention, patience, and dedication can be linked to the formation of intensive mothering as a middle-class ideal, and the elevation of the domestic sphere as the natural place for this mothering work to occur.