In my reading, I have found female sorrow to be a recurrent theme despite cultural differences. Amy Tan, in The Joy Luck Club (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1989), speaks of the passing down of sorrow across Chinese female generations: says one auntie, "I was raised the Chinese way: I was taught to desire nothing, to swallow other people's misery, to eat my own bitterness. And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way" (p. 9).
Nancy Mairs writes of her mother, "What I didn't see, and maybe she didn't either, was that behind her anger lay the anxiety and frustration caused by her helplessness to protect me from my pain." Mairs speaks of a "reflexive maternal guilt" felt by her mother and by herself, a guilt that seems to say, "I'm sorry"—"'I'm sorry I can't keep you perfectly full, perfectly dry, perfectly free from gas and fear, perfectly, perfectly happy. Any mother knows that if she could do these things, her infant would die more surely than if she covered its face with a rose-printed pillow. Still, part of her desire is to prevent the replication of desire," in Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman's Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), pp. 74-75.
Marianna De Marco Torgovnick writes, "The line between [my] worries and my mother's is the line between the working class and the upper middle class. ... Now, as I write ... I recognize that although I've come far in physical and material distance, the emotional distance is harder to gauge," in Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 10-11.
Patricia J. Williams, writing about her mother encouraging her to go to law school, recalls: "My mother was asking me not to look to her as a role model. ... She hid the lonely, black, defiled-female part of herself and pushed me forward as the projection of a competent self, a cool rather than despairing self, a masculine rather than a feminine self," in The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 216-17.
Sara Lawrence Lightfoot speaks of her mother being "determined that her children's experiences would not parallel hers." She "promised herself that her daughters would wear colors—bold, intense colors, colors that would show off their beautiful brown skin," rather than the dark colors she had been taught to wear by her mother, in Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1989), pp. 309-10.
The narcissistic wounding of a female child by her mother is discussed in Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); de Lauretis suggests that "In a culture perversely homophobic" and gendered (so that females are both less valuable and less desirable), the mother wounds the daughter with a sense of "lack of a loveable body" (pp. 242-43).
Other relevant personal accounts include: Nancy K. Miller, "Coda: Loehmann's, Or, Shopping with My Mother," in Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 139-41; Kesaya E. Noda, "Growing Up Asian in America," in Asian Women United of California, ed., Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women (Boston: Beacon, 1989); pp. 243-51; and Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
For theoretical views, see Nancy J. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978) and "Family Structure and Feminine Personality," in Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 45-65; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds., Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Adrienne Rich, "Motherhood and Daughterhood," in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 218-55. A recent review of feminist literature on mothering that includes works of French psychoanalytic feminists is Ellen Ross, "New Thoughts on 'the Oldest Vocation': Mothers and Motherhood in Recent Feminist Scholarship," Signs 20:2 (1995): 397-413.