Children at Sunday school class. Ansel Adams, photographer. 1943. Prints and Photographs Division. LC-DIG-ppprs-00347 (b&w digital file from original print) bibliographic record

The Library holds more than two thousand elementary-school primers and readers. These small volumes show the vocabulary, concepts, and literature considered appropriate for children at various age levels in different time periods. The texts and illustrations depict clothing, homes, and toys, as well as conventional views of children and adults and activities thought suitable for each sex.

In a lesson from the Franklin Second Reader (1873) [catalog record], a mother advises her daughter to be good, clean, tidy, to do as she is bidden, and to attend to her sewing.⁴⁰ More than seventy years later, School Friends (1951) [catalog record] explains that mother helps us by cooking, sewing, and shopping for food, and father helps us by carpentry, lawn mowing, and fire building.⁴¹ You can clearly see cultural norms, contemporary values, and gender stereotypes that children are taught in their school readers.

These primers, like college catalogs, education-association journals, or histories of individual schools, are examples from the vast quantity of material available for studying the education of girls and women at the Library of Congress. School readers also serve historians in other fields such as sports and language.