Abstract This paper traces writing by middle‐class women involved in organising and teaching kindergartens in the USA and Canada from about 1860 to 1910. It is suggested that it is possible to construct several stories from these texts, and that post‐structuralist strategies for textual analysis are invaluable in doing so. In order to write feminist accounts of kindergarten work, however, historians need also to attend to the social relations and historical conditions in which texts were produced, read and used, and in which they became consequential for women and children.