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Winter
Books Mothers and daughters undergo transition into
equality
MOTHERS TO
DAUGHTERS: SEARCHING FOR NEW CONNECTIONS By Ann F. Caron Henry
Holt and Company, 288 pages, $13 paper |
By JUDITH BROMBERG
Every girl yearns to know her mother. The longing may touch
a woman at any time of her life, wrote Ann Caron in 1991 in Dont
Stop Loving Me: A Reassuring Guide for Mothers of Adolescent Daughters. She
ended that book by writing: It is never too late because [mothers and
daughters] have not stopped wanting to love each other.
As a follow up to her earlier book, after two volumes about
raising sons, Caron has now published Mothers to Daughters in which she
re-focuses on the mother-daughter relationship as the younger woman enters her
20s and concentrates her attention on that decade in the relationship.
Their generational influences differ, their manner of speaking differs,
their goals differ, but their dreams of finding themselves through connections
are the same.
Caron moves chronologically through most of the book from the
daughters transition into college to her wedding day. Along the way,
however, she addresses such topics as boyfriends, grandmothers, mentors,
effects of parents own divorce, and religion.
Besides what you might expect to find in a chapter on the college
years, such as how the relationship was altered by the daughter moving out of
the home, how mothers respond to their daughters new exposure to more
permissive attitudes toward drinking and sexual activity, this and other
chapters develop an ongoing theme, what one respondent called the
transition into equality. Both mothers and daughters must adjust to new
ways of relating as their lives evolve apart from one another.
Independent young women today are forming fierce friendships with
one another, more so than their mothers did at the equivalent stage of life,
probably because mothers married earlier and frequently put a higher value on
male relationships (dates) than on their female friends. Todays young
women see relationships with one another as a benchmark of their generation and
a strength to be celebrated.
Another strength of todays young women, Caron suggests, is
their ability to balance competition and cooperation. They are competitive;
they want to advance, but not at the expense of one another. Womens
cooperative nature is not unique to this generation, but is fine-tuned by them
to create as many opportunities and promotions as the combination will net
them.
To help them progress along the career path, many young women have
sought out or fallen into mentoring relationships in the workplace -- yet
another person, usually an older woman, besides friends and boyfriends, for a
mother to share her daughter with. Wise mothers know when not to press for
their daughters attention and confidences. And whereas mothers and
daughters can and should be friends, daughters cannot supply their mothers with
a peer friendship.
Women in their 50s today often did not make the kind of close
friendships their daughters have, (the Ya Ya Sisterhood notwithstanding,)
perhaps because of marriage and frequent career moves with their husbands. Many
envy their daughters this kind of friendship; some may try to replicate it with
their daughters. This friendship issue is especially apparent in the case of
divorced women who have reached out to their children, especially daughters, to
be a sounding board and to fill an emotional void. Interestingly, a
parents divorce seems to impact not at all a young womans decision
to marry.
What is not necessarily contentious between this generation of
mothers and daughters is organized religion. Of course there are mothers who
are dismayed that their daughters do not hold steadfastly to the religious
practices of their youth, but more and more older women are themselves feeling
at odds with the religions they practiced all their lives. Mid-life women
and their daughters fall through the cracks of the foundations of major
religions. ... They and their daughters sound astonishingly alike as they
discuss their dissatisfaction with traditional religions that fail to offer a
direction at this stage of their lives. What is sad but true is that most
congregations do not know how to attract educated young women, but this is not
to say that women of any age are not seeking spiritual fulfillment. They are
just finding it in alternative ways.
Whatever the relationship between a woman and her 20s-age daughter
today, short of total estrangement, it will probably be mirrored in this book.
Caron writes in her conclusion that the voices of young women heard in
these pages clearly speak of their desire for connections, connections to
friends, boyfriends, co-workers, spirituality, families (including fathers) but
especially mothers.
Daughters in this new generation do not turn away
from mothers, even those who are difficult.
Caron touches on a wide range of topics, more than can be covered
here, and uses a plethora of voices and anecdotal material, but she never
describes her sample. She acknowledges using research completed by the
Wellesley College Center for Women, and presumably she conducted some
interviews herself, but how geographically, ethnically and socio-economically
diverse were they?
Whereas there are opinions and situations that cover the
continuum, just to use an easy example: Some mothers still take the leading
role in planning their daughters wedding, while some daughters are
retaining that privilege for themselves. There is no way within the context of
the book to place ones self in relation to the whole and to assess what
it really means. How many mothers and daughters were, in fact, interviewed? Did
birth order or only-child status make a difference? To what degree does
education factor in? Caron stresses that todays young career women are
leading different lives from their mothers. Could that not be said of any
generation of young women? My own mother was born in the horse and buggy era,
but as a young employed woman with some college, owned her own car and spoke
highly of a woman who had helped guide her career. Furthermore, she did not
marry until she was 30. So my point is, without any statistical
differentiation, couldnt much the same have been written about any set of
mothers and daughters in any given era as each strained not to be the
other?
What I do agree with wholeheartedly, however, besides the idea
that daughters yearn to know their mothers, is found in Carons
conclusion: In each phase of their lives, mothers and daughters will find
new connections. And what I hope for mothers and daughters everywhere,
best put in Carons own words: A young woman and her mid-life mother
are just beginning their long friendship.
Judith Bromberg is a regular reviewer for NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, November 5,
1999
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