And then there is the mother who doesn’t know why she finds only depression in what should be the joyous events of raising her child. This, too, speaks to the dynamic between the institution of motherhood, and mothering as socially situated practice. In the advice pages of magazines cited in this chapter, for every piece of advice on promoting children’s reading, there were many more that counseled women who were feeling tired and depressed, lonely and isolated. Such advice was shaped and supported by commercial advertising for products to help women feel less tired, more beautiful, less lonely, more competent and confident. Yet voices of boredom, isolation, and despair are woven through the pages of Chatelaine and Parents’ Magazine, particularly in the 1950s. Though they fall outside the realm of literacy advice, these voices are nevertheless vital reminders of the broader context, as well as the diversity of individual experience, that shaped mothering, and domestic literacy work in post war North America. The genealogy of the mother-teacher of literacy in Chapter Four suggested discursive strategies that inform an analysis of contemporary literacy advice to mothers. The analysis suggested that while advice may be read as “disciplinary texts” to guide desired literacy practices in children, these texts were also very much about disciplining mothering and mothers’ literacy practices. In this chapter, I sketch the discursive shape of literacy advice to mothers in the 1950s and 1960s from the perspective of women’s shifting roles as domestic literacy managers. I foreground this with an analysis of literacy advice that appeared in women’s magazines in early years of the Twentieth Century, though such advice was relatively rare and did not constitute the “wave” of literacy advice that appeared in the later Nineteenth Century, nor would appear again in the mid-1950s.

As noted in Chapter Two, feminist scholars have explored child-raising advice to mothers in the inter-war and post-war eras (Arnup, 1996; Gleason, 1999). The analysis of literacy advice in this chapter builds upon and extends that literature by re-analysing popular child-raising texts through a “literacy lens.” While this chapter builds on themes outlined in Chapter Four, it also identifies new themes and discursive strategies linked to intensive mothering, domestic pedagogy, and the normal family. These new themes include the rise of psychology and the “mental hygiene” movement, and the association of literacy advice with other constructs of normalcy, such as the ideal of the nuclear family, attachment theory, and the “sensitive mother.” Inter-textual links in literacy advice from psychologists, the medical profession, and education institutions also provide rich terrain for exploring the ways in which literacy advice was distributed and “normed” across diverse institutional settings.