In this way, we must be wary of drawing the same pedagogical meanings from the advice for women living in very different social and economic worlds. What seems “intense” (Hays, 1996) mothering in an early nineteenth-century text geared toward a Victorian mother whose children were educated at home, who did not need to contend with the timetables and surveillance of schools, and whose pedagogic work was likely carried out by nurses, may take on a different meaning for contemporary mothering practices and ideals. Indeed, we are not dealing, in the Nineteenth Century, with the same discourse of “intensity” because we are not dealing with the same contexts for literacy learning, or the same social organization of mothering.

With this caveat aside, there is evidence to suggest that while discourses of intensive mothering and domestic pedagogy offered different positions for women across social class locations, and over the shifting social and educational relations of the Nineteenth Century, they can nevertheless be recognized by their interdependence upon discourses of the “normal family.” Indeed, achieving the social visions of morality, industrialized capitalism, and later nationhood, depended upon the availability of women’s work to the Church, and later to the School, and thus upon the ideal of domesticity in which women were available to do this literacy work.

While women needed to negotiate positions for themselves as legitimate readers and writers (Flint, 1993; Green, 2001), many benefited from the fact that it was upon the basis of their mothering, and the high value accorded to literacy in the restricted form it was promoted, that women were able to claim social and political rights. Moreover, as the “century of the child” dawned, a more gentler disposition toward children appealed to New World families and social reformers such as Child and Key. In understanding who gains power within these discourses of mothering, these nuances must be taken into account, and thus constitute an important theme in the first decades of the Twentieth Century when formal schooling is consolidated in Canada and the United States.

This genealogy suggests that the mother-as-teacher-of-literacy is rooted in mothering discourses which resonate in the Twenty-first Century. Of interest in the remainder of this study are the continuities, discontinuities, and shifts in literacy advice discourses, and the new strategies and techniques that become attached to these over time. The next chapter explores literacy advice with a particular focus on the 1950s and 1960s, although considerable attention is paid to literacy advice in the early years of the Twentieth Century as both a link to nineteenth-century images of the ideal nineteenth-century mother, and a foregrounding to her incarnation in the context of post-war democratic ideals and cold war competition.