It is here that mothers’ roles in domestic literacy management can be interpreted as social and cultural reproduction work, as much as it was “literacy” work. Through the lenses of habitus, and social and cultural reproduction, it is possible to interpret the different class positioning of mothers in this nineteenth-century advice as a function of the power attributed to literacy, or at least the power attributed to the performance of literacy practices associated with middle-class habitus, in maintaining class privilege. Literacy advice proceeded on the assumption that by emulating the habitus of the upper-classes in Victorian society, “cottage” and pauper classes could overcome poverty. Here is an early indication of the power that would come to be attributed to the performance of idealized literacy practices, such as story book reading, in erasing social class inequalities. This is evidenced in the advice in Mothers’ Magazine that with respect to family reading, the home of the poor family should “ponder the suggestion, and enjoy the privilege” (1848). Yet as a literacy practice in its own right, domestic advice worked to maintain social class privilege. In this way, the dividing strategies used to differentiate domestic literacy tasks of upper class, cottage, and “pauper” families, served as both a promise of social mobility but also as a reinforcement of social distance: “how we are different to they” (Robbins, 2004, p. 82).

The aim to maintain social class privilege was also achieved in literacy advice through normalization of domestic pedagogy. Raising literate, moral children was embedded in domestic pedagogy. Images in advice of teaching were in the context of the domestic sphere where children counted chickens, peeled nutmegs, and were read to as they sewed and knitted. Yet the forms of domestic literacy available to mothers were restricted by the type of texts they had access to and the practices associated with it. The socialization of women as natural caregivers and models of morality for their children was conflated with women’s biology and reproductive roles, with the effect of rendering women natural mentors of literacy, and thus naturally responsible for their children’s literacy knowledge. As Graff (1979) pointed out, this literacy knowledge took the form of a social code, imbued with habitus of middle and upper class Anglo-Saxon culture.

Yet it was suggested as well that in the absence of widespread and compulsory schooling, literacy advice to mothers varied across contexts, and there was evidence that children’s literacy practices were mentored by a range of people other than mothers; fathers were ideally linked to the family reading circle, older children, nurses, and governesses provided role models for literacy practices, and reading, though valued, was not the most important form of knowledge for children raised on the North American frontiers and in cottage industries.