Norma Gabler, a Texas homemaker who recoiled at material in her children’s textbooks and became the public face of a crusade with her husband to rid schoolbooks of content they considered antifamily, anti-American and anti-God, died on July 22 in Phoenix. She was 84.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, her son James said.

From its origins at the Gablers’ kitchen table in Hawkins, Tex., in 1961 to its incorporation as Educational Research Analysts in 1973, the mom-and-pop textbook-criticism enterprise grew to occupy a prominent niche in the nation’s conservative pantheon. For more than four decades, the couple influenced what children read, not just in Texas but around the country.

The reason was Texas’ power to be a national template; the state board chooses textbooks for the entire state, and of the 20 or so states that choose books statewide, only California is bigger than Texas. It is difficult and costly for publishers to put out multiple editions, so a book rejected by Texas might not be printed at all.

In a 1982 article in The New York Times, Anthony T. Podesta, executive director of People for the American Way, a liberal group, said, “Texas has the buying power to influence the development of teaching materials nationwide, and a textbook edition chosen for Texas often becomes the sole edition available.”