Chapter Four—
The Turning Point:
Mothers and Daughters at the Birth of Second-Wave Feminism

Carol: "I mean I know you're trying to help, but you can't be objective about this. You're my mother."
Maude: "Carol, I'm not only your mother. I'm your friend, Carol, your best friend."
Carol: "Well you can't be my mother and my best friend too."
Maude: "Yes I can!"
Carol: "No you can't!"
Maude: "Now don't contradict me, Carol. I'm your mother."
Carol: "Well I don't need a mother right now. You say you're my friend. Then be my friend."
Maude: "All right. I will speak to you as a friend. Listen to your mother, Carol!"
—"Maude," 1975

In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and echoed torch singer Peggy Lee when she asked American women, "Is that all there is?" After over a decade spent amid the eerie cheerfulness of the domestic fantasy, the facade was beginning to crack. Friedan's book spoke of this domestic ideology as both illusion and entrapment. She grieved for the images of valiant heroines and independent women she had seen in the thirties and during the war years and tried to understand the "retreat to the home" that characterized the period in which she both lived and wrote. Because of her own work as a women's magazine writer, she articulated a familiarity and forcefulness that bespoke her intimate knowledge of what she termed "the problem that has no name."

Clearly, the women's movement, much less feminism, did not emerge full-blown the day after Friedan's tome hit the bookstores. Indeed, for a large part of the sixties, it was business as usual. "Oz-

zie and Harriet" ran until 1966, as did "The Donna Reed Show," even though June Cleaver of "Leave It to Beaver" and Margaret Anderson of "Father Knows Best" had faded out by 1963. The lure of an idyllic suburbia still exerted itself on the ever-expanding body politic, and barbecues and home decorating remained favorite domestic activities. Yet the sixties saw the full development of the significant social movements of our time: the civil rights movement, the antiwar and student movements, and, toward the end of the decade, the women's movement. Indeed, as Sara Evans so forcefully argues, the women's movement itself was in large part a product of women's engagement both in civil rights struggles and in the culture and politics of the New Left.^[1] These years were saturated with a social upheaval made even more compelling in contrast to the previous years of feminine containment and McCarthyite repression. "The sixties" (really the late sixties and early seventies) have come to represent America's own unique experience of internal dissonance and rebellion. They mark off a watershed of American history as distinctive as World War II, one that shaped and structured the public consciousness in fundamentally new and challenging ways.

What happens to the images of the mother/daughter relationship in a world of televised napalm bombings and Woodstock, sit-ins and marches on Washington? What happens to these images when the women's movement really emerges, both as a cultural discourse and as a vast panoply of experiences and practices? How does the new language of feminism and the new location of women as media subjects structure and shape the way we look at and think about the mother/daughter relationship?

The shift from an ideology in the sixties that perpetuated a (leftover from the fifties) maternal evil/maternal good dichotomy to the emergence of full-blown feminism in the seventies can also be seen specifically as a media shift. Television, and the sitcom in particular, came into its own in the seventies as a medium that was something more than a simple reinforcement of the status quo. Television exhibited a greater willingness than film to engage with the women's movement and the new familial configurations. As TV critic Ella Taylor notes: "The ubiquity of television and its intensely domestic character make it an ideal form in which to observe changing ideas about family. It is watched by a vast number of people in their

homes; its advertising is geared to both the parts and the whole of the family unit; its images, in both news and entertainment, are stamped with the familial."^[2] One of the greatest surprises of this research has been the realization of the vast difference between television and film in the early years of the women's movement. Typically thought of as an endless repetition of hackneyed clichés, television in this feminist heyday of the seventies far outstripped film in its intrepid adventures through a changing social terrain. Except for a few notable exceptions, the "new Hollywood women's cinema" of the seventies made only occasional inroads against the hegemony of the alienated male/buddy films of the sixties and seventies. Thus I focus here more on television and women's magazines than on film because these media were engaged more closely with the radical offerings of the women's movement.

Rebel with a Bad Mother, or, the Case of the Missing Daughter

What is most striking about film in the sixties and seventies is the almost complete absence of images—either "good" or "bad"—of mothers and daughters. Aside from Inside Daisy Clover (1965), The Graduate (1967), Rachel, Rachel (1968), The Turning Point (1977), and a few others, one is hard-pressed to find any films dealing with mothers and daughters in even the most remote and oblique fashion. Certainly the most popular films of the period were more engaged with themes of war, male bonding, rebellious (male) alienation, and the counterculture male antihero. In these narratives, women were the less than secondary sexual objects serving as release or, alternately, frustration to the ever-present angst of the angry young man. If the backdrop to mainstream sixties culture was the counterculture New Left, then the narratives provided by this New Left were relentlessly male in subject and style, with women occasionally grafted on as new products of a "sexual revolution" that made them more available to the male (anti)heroes and less available as substantive subjects of the narrative itself.

Molly Haskell might be overstating the case when she claims, "From a woman's point of view, the ten years from, say 1962 or 1963 to 1973 have been the most disheartening in screen history."^[3] Nevertheless, it does seem a period more notable for its absence of

significant female roles in film than for anything else. This absence is accentuated when we look for the more specific representation of mothers and daughters. Although mother/son relationships abounded in the sixties (Sons and Lovers, Return to Peyton Place, Long Day's Journey into Night, All Fall Down, The Manchurian Candidate, The Stripper, Five Finger Exercise, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , etc.), mothers and daughters seem to be invisible in the ever-present dramas of rebellious male torment and ball-breaking momism.^[4]

Sixties films introduced a new angle on the theme of the bad mother warping her children. Studiously ignoring the specificity of student protest, civil rights struggles, and the antiwar movement, the films of the sixties instead refracted social discord through the lens of domestic, intergenerational disharmony. No film could speak to this theme more eloquently than Rebel Without a Cause . Even though made in 1955, Rebel exemplified the sixties trend toward narratives of alienated young men, docile fathers, and overbearing and dominating mothers. Typically thought of as a classic and heartrending tale of youthful alienation and social/parental repression, it takes on a less valiant hue when viewed through the eyes of mothers. If ever there was a Wyliesque "mom" personified, it is in the figure of Jim Stark's (James Dean) mother—overpowering, smothering, aggressive, and, most important, denying her son the strong male model he needs through her dominance of the "hen-pecked" husband. In this saga of generational rebellion, mothers play the unfortunate role of the subjugator of youthful growth and development. As David Considine notes:

The image of the mother that dominated the sixties was a logical outgrowth of a trend that began in the forties and developed steadily throughout the 1950's. It was an image that seemed to obsess the industry. In the process, it served to obscure the issues of the day. While film families throughout the decade are strife-ridden and torn apart, the issues dividing them remain obscure. . . . What we find instead in these film families is domestic discord based on the possessiveness and aggression of wives and mothers.^[5]

Splendor in the Grass (1961) similarly pairs overbearing mothers with weak fathers (Deenie's parents) and macho fathers with submissive mothers (Bud's parents). The echo of structural-func-

tionalist theories of complementarity can be heard in this oft-repeated formula of familial patterns. Deenie's mother drives her daughter to the asylum by articulating her own Victorian ideas of sexuality to the desirous and suffering teenager ("Your father never laid a hand on me until we were married. And then I, I just gave in because a wife had to. A woman doesn't enjoy those things the way a man does. She just lets her husband . . . come near her in order to have children.").

Inside Daisy Clover , although primarily a film about the tawdry and manipulative construction of "the star" in the days of the studio system, allows a sympathetic mother figure, but one rendered likable only through her obvious insanity. Daisy's mother, played wonderfully by Ruth Gordon, is not used narratively as a maternal presence, but serves as the narrative ploy to return Daisy to her prestar "naturalness." As in so many earlier films, the mother must die for the daughter to "cleanse" herself and break out of the patterns of self-destruction.

The 1967 hit The Graduate (still understood as a "classic" film of the sixties, like Easy Rider ) pitted the adulterous, cynical, almost grotesque Mrs. Robinson against her angelic daughter, who is the real object of Jonathan's affections. The generation gap is made manifest both in the relationship between the mother and daughter and in Jonathan's relationships with his egregiously middle-class parents. But it becomes embodied in the person of the demonized mother, as the final scene in the chapel indicates. As Jonathan comes to "save" Katherine from an unloving bourgeois marriage, the mother is literally silenced; we only see her lips furiously spewing forth her anger and resentment at her daughter and at Jonathan. The daughter is allowed the final words: "You had your chance, now let me have mine." The daughter's voice breaks through the imposed silence of maternal possessiveness and domestic pathos. But, more important, both women's voices are reduced to mere plot devices in the service of the male coming of age narrative.

Mother as grotesque was a popular theme in many other films, such as Rachel, Rachel (1968). Like her Bette Davis counterpart in Now, Voyager , the Joanne Woodward character is a slightly off-center "spinster" daughter living with her even more off-center and domineering mother. Once again (as in Now, Voyager ) the father has died years ago, leaving the devoted but seething-inside daugh-

Fig. 18.
Poor Katherine Ross is caught between the selfish desires of her lusty 
mom and the rebellious angst of her male savior in the 1960s classic 
The Graduate . (Embassy Pictures, 1967; photo courtesy of Photofest)

ter to take care of her demanding and dependent mother. Here, too, the daughter is kept a virtual prisoner by her Wyliesque mom and achieves an attenuated sort of freedom by leaving town and forcing her mother either to come with her or to stay on her own (the mother comes along). Given these options, one wonders whether absence (of mothers and daughters in film) isn't more desirable!

Sixties television was equally wanting when it came to representing mothers and daughters, indeed, when it came to substantial female characters at all. First, westerns had a resurgence with such popular shows as "Gunsmoke," "Wagon Train," and "Bonanza." These continued to receive high ratings throughout the sixties, even with the influx of the "wacky" comedies such as "Bewitched," "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Green Acres," "Hogan's Heroes," "Get Smart," "The Addams Family," and "The Flying Nun."^[6] From 1960 to 1970, no shows with significant mother/daughter relationships achieved ratings in the top ten.^[7] When it came to the serious exploration of mothers and daughters, the TV industry in the sixties was as uninterested as the film industry appeared to be. Not until the

1970 season, with the birth of "Mary Tyler Moore," and 1971, with "All in the Family," do adult mother/daughter relationships begin to peek forth from behind the ossified images of western macho men and countrified sex kittens. In 1972, with "Maude" and "The Waltons" joining the pack, mothers and their teenage or adult daughters emerge as a significant force in television narrative.^[8]

The Problem Does Have a Name: Slouching Toward Feminism

While the visual media of the sixties retained a resolutely male (albeit often alienated and rebellious) outlook, the women's magazines, in their implicit targeting of a gendered audience, continued to explore issues of relevance to women's lives, including the relationship of mother to daughter. The women's magazines present a microcosm of the contradictory images of mothering and the mother/daughter relationship during the sixties and seventies. Beginning in 1963 with Friedan's The Feminine Mystique , they engage in a series of highly truncated debates over the central challenges of Friedan's thesis. Importantly, Friedan was one of their own, not simply an outside expert who could be cited and then pushed aside to make way for a more homegrown editorial stance. As in the fifties, the women's magazines expressed a wider variety of responses to the changing social/sexual situation than did film and television. Not until the mid-seventies did the visual media explore "women's issues" with the same vigor the women's magazines had used earlier.

This is not to say the magazines gave their full and unfettered support to the growing women's movement. In fact, writers commented harshly on the "trend" toward liberation, a harshness magnified in other popular presses, such as Time, Look , and Life . For example, in Look of January 11, 1966, Patricia Coffin extols the virtues of "true womanhood" very explicitly in reaction to what she sees as a dangerous move toward the obliteration of sex distinctions. She quotes Friedan disdainfully and goes on to tell women, "It's time you woke up, because the joke is on you." In arguing for the intractability of gender difference, Coffin obliquely blames mothers for the "alienation" of modern (male) youth, a theme evi-

dent throughout the sixties and one that has been thoroughly echoed in film: "The boys grow their hair because the girls wear the pants. . . . The climate is phony. You don't really want to look like a tinker toy or a little boy. You are a gender apart and lucky to have a man to lean on. . . . You ought to go back to being a woman." She connects the return of the real woman with the return of the real man: "If you can find your way back to true womanhood . . . in the deep, beautifully illogical female sense, the American man will recover his pride and his manhood."^[9]

An article by Eunice Kennedy Shriver in McCall's of June 1965 echoed this plea for a return to women's true destiny with an angry attack on abortion rights activists and those who would in any way impinge on the sanctity of motherhood: "I believe in motherhood as the nourishment of life. Women have been rearing children for fifty million years. It is what we do best. Only we can do it. It is the most wonderful, the most satisfying thing we could possibly do."^[10]

A 1966 forum in The PTA Magazine that included pieces by Ann Landers and Mary S. Calderone specifically addressed the question, "Are Girls Getting Too Aggressive?" Again, the reference to the new women's movement is explicit, and, again, mothers are the sole referents for the cause of their daughters' putative aggressiveness. Here, as in so many articles, the inclusive language of "parent" is invoked; yet the specific example is always mother: "The solution lies with the parents of American girls. Girls need to be taught by their mothers that sex is not dirty or evil, that it is an important part of married love."^[11] Yet this forum is symptomatic of the contradictory impulses within the women's magazine literature. On the one hand, Ann Landers is bemoaning, like Patricia Coffin, the sorry state of womanhood in the mid-sixties. Yet other articles contest this angry and nostalgic discourse of "return to true womanhood" and seem to tolerate, and at times even embrace, a critique of traditional gender hierarchy, as in Lester Kirkendall's piece in the same forum entitled "Away with Stereotypes."

As with films, women's magazines often interpreted social rebellion and "social problems" through the stern gaze of parental (again read "maternal") responsibility. In a 1961 piece in Good Housekeeping , David Lester asks, and answers, the question: "Are You Pushing Your Daughter Into Too-Early Marriage?" Lester identifies the rising rates of teenage pregnancy and marriage as a significant social

problem and, not surprisingly, blames mothers for the precocious social/sexual behavior of their daughters: "Youngsters are pressured into dating by their own socially active parents, who urge them into a variety of social situations. Mothers are generally the prime movers; fathers, busy with the bread-winning, generally go along with the decision."^[12] Notice again the discursive move from "parents" to "mothers," a trusty maneuver of almost every women's magazine article that concerns parents and their children.

This article has a double message in that it positions the girl as responsible for the social problems of early pregnancy and marriage and then further implicates women by positioning the mother as responsible for creating the situation of precociousness that led to daughter's downfall. After recounting the horror story of sixteen-year-old Clarissa's early marriage and subsequent suicide attempt, Lester clearly sees mom as responsible: "Let us look more closely at girls such as Clarissa who teeter to the altar on high heels they have barely learned to wear. What makes them rush so? Even more important, how are their parents, particularly mothers, actually forcing them into early matrimony without realizing it?"^[13] Ironically, Lester completely overlooks another part of his own story—the fact that Clarissa's young husband "wished her dead" prior to her wrist slashing—and finds the origin of daughter's acting out in her mother's nostalgia for her own lost youth:

With the prospect of oncoming middle years too painful to contemplate, they look back, instead, where there is fun once again in dates—this time their daughters! . . . The young girl, knowing she has her mother's approval, finds her a willing listener and even an accomplice in her romantic problems. . . . The mother deludes herself into believing she has a confiding relationship with her daughter. Actually, it's a conspiratorial one, and one she enjoys hugely. The result, however, is to push her child deeper and deeper into an advanced social and sexual whirl.^[14]

The author is here criticizing mothers for trying to "keep up with the times," but just a few years before the women's magazines had been filled with advice urging mothers to remain as hip and flexible as possible. This reversal needs to be seen in the context of a social environment that positioned youth as "dangerous" and thus initiated a discourse of parental (read "maternal") responsibility. This discourse of responsibility is not new, as shown in preceding chap-

ters. Yet it changes its focus in the context of the student and antiwar movement in the sixties, for the student movement was certainly not equivalent to the juvenile-delinquency panic of the late forties and fifties, and the participants much more profoundly challenged the values of their parents and of society at large. Nevertheless, just as Wylie castigated mothers for being overbearing and producing weak sons, unprepared for manly military heroism, his sixties counterparts took mothers to task for creating rebellious youth, for raising children too "liberally" and with not enough discipline and authority. Many things remain constant about the two periods, but the most striking is the lack of concern for girls and their mothers and the overwhelming focus on the mother/son and sometimes the father/son relationship. Daughters are simply not considered actors in this new drama of generational and cultural rebellion. So the discourse on the mother/daughter relationship remains more firmly anchored to the "classic" psychological constructs that had begun in the forties and in many ways is little transformed by the social and political turmoil of the (prefeminist) sixties.

Mothers are generally taken to task in relation to more traditional complaints from daughters (e.g., maternal interference and the lack of separation). In the regular Good Housekeeping section called "My Problem and How I Solved It," a woman tells the story of how her mother came to live with her and her family, causing a breakdown in the daughter, who finally realizes (with the help of the friendly psychiatrist) that it's because she can't grow up with her overinvolved mother: "Most mothers know they must to some degree 'lose' their children as they grow up. The best mothers, even at pain to themselves, try to help them to be independent. But my mother, I came to realize, had never accepted this idea. She fought to keep me from growing up, from growing away from her." The good doctor explains the woman's "fatigue" completely in relation to her mother's presence and her own failings: "Dr. Harvey had been right. My fatigue had been a symptom of everything that had been bottled up inside me—resentment of Mother, a childish fear of her disapproval, anger at my own failings, and a lot of self-pity. Nowadays, I can do all the housework in half the time, with half the effort." Given the later "problem that has no name" interpretation of housewives' depression, this passage has particular poi-

gnancy, and the resolution reasserts rather than challenges her submission: "I'm still Mother's daughter, but I am even more Howard's wife, and Jill's mother."^[15]

Other authors insist on a mother's right to work, not merely to maintain the family's level of consumption, but for "personal satisfaction." Norman Lobsenz, writing in a 1961 Redbook article, argues that because so many wives are working ("One out of every three wives in the nation holds a job today."), it becomes important to move away from guilt and toward an honest assessment of why women desire to work: "What concerns the experts on family life today is not that so many mothers are working, but that they are so often confused about their reasons for working, and that by deluding themselves and their families about their motives in taking a job, they create a host of wholly unnecessary problems."^[16] Although he still sees the women and work question as precisely that—a question (like child care and birth control) that is solely up to women to resolve, as if male attitudes and male power didn't enter into the equation—Lobsenz is careful to argue against the guilt feelings of many mothers. He even discusses the possible benefits working mothers might transmit to their children, a debate that hasn't progressed much further since.

A specific discourse about the "problem that has no name" began even before the phrase was coined. In 1961, Parents' Magazine published an article by Elizabeth Schmidt entitled "The Best Mothers Aren't Martyrs" in which the author expresses precisely the frustrations of the feminine mystique: "I'm bored with the housework, irritated by my children and tired—tired all the time. I love my husband and my family, but what about my own needs and wishes? I'm lost—nothing more than a machine for cleaning furniture and scolding children. What's ahead of me? Nothing but more of the same. I feel just awful feeling this way, but I can't help it."^[17]

After detailing her life before marriage, where she felt immense satisfaction as an army nurse overseas, she has "to admit that when I said all I wanted was to be a good wife and mother, I wasn't being honest. I wanted something else besides—to be a person in my own right." Several interactions with her young daughter push her into this realization and force her to initiate change on her own behalf: "One day . . . I watched six-year-old Jan . . . playing house.

'Oh, now I have to do the dishes,' Jan wailed. Then, shouting at the long suffering doll, 'How can I get anything done with you always in the way?' Her performance as a weary, sighing mother got better and better. I realized I was looking at an imitation of myself." This is precisely the process the mother wants to halt, brought home by yet another instance of the daughter's budding domesticity: "Another time, Jan was helping me dust. She rubbed listlessly at the dining room table, confiding to me with a long face, 'It's hard to be a mother, isn't it Mommy?'"^[18]

Schmidt is able to break out only so far; her decision to take part-time work and be a less perfectionist housecleaner are predicated on a reading of her situation in completely individualistic terms (my fault, not society's) and in fact adopting as a rationale a resurrected version of the companionate marriage: "The aims I set for myself weren't conflicting at all—perhaps I could be a good wife and mother without sacrificing my own personal growth! Perhaps what was wrong was not my situation but myself—what was needed was not martyrdom but energy and determination. I decided to try for both worlds."^[19] Little Jan's premature domesticity is thus understood solely in terms of her mother's modeling rather than as part of the socialization of young girls into "appropriate femininity."

A 1966 Look article entitled "The War Between Mother and Daughter" attempts to reassert both the language of biological determinism and the metaphors of war to describe the mother/daughter relationship. In this reading, mothers and daughters are drawn together through their biological destiny as mothers; yet, paradoxically, this sameness initiates what the authors tellingly call the "cold war": "And there is a rapport, an intimacy between women, which men can never achieve. Women are drawn together by a simple and complicated fact: Their bodies are designed to bear children, and they share an understanding of the physical changes and discomforts that accompany that privilege. The cold war starts when the little girl discovers she and her mother are of the same sex—and daddy is different." As penis envy creeps into the discourse of women's magazines, so does its ultimate Freudian purpose: the construction of an inevitable rift between women and the subsequent push toward an overriding male identification: "I believe that no girl can ever become a whole woman unless she understands and has made a mature acceptance of her mother. . . .

For if she still resents her mother and yearns for the kind of affection she thinks her mother denied her, she may have difficulty ever reaching a satisfactory relation with a man, leaning (consciously or unconsciously) toward women as mother substitutes."^[20]

Coming to terms with mother is not yet understood in feminist terms (e.g., mother as another woman) but still in terms of how the mother/daughter relationship affects the "real" heart of our existence: our relationships with men. It is precisely these discourses—of biology as bonding and bonding as healthy heterosexuality—that begin to change as feminism enters the popular language of the women's magazines in the early seventies. Even more than in the sixties, women's magazines in the seventies continued to explore central issues of the mother/daughter relationship in the context of an ever-growing women's movement. In 1976, Janet Kole asked these very questions in an article she wrote for Harper's Bazaar:

Is it harder to raise a child these days? Has 1976 brought any revelations about mothers and daughters? Is it easier or harder for them to have a good relationship in this atmosphere of increasing awareness of what it means to be a woman? . . . The 70s and the Women's Movement have brought new dilemmas and new joys for women and one area in which dilemma and joy are particularly intermingled is the mother/daughter relationship. All the talk and thinking about ourselves as feminists has brought us back to our beginnings; we are examining the women who made us what we are and the daughters whom we will inevitably shape.^[21]

Other writers became aware of the paucity of materials on mothers and daughters:

One could make a good case for there being no human relationship so dramatic and so rich in possibility as that between mother and daughter; and it is strange to me that so little literature—always excepting psychiatrists' notebooks and the literature of pathology—has attempted adequately to deal with it. One is hard-pressed to think of contemporary novels that focus on mother-daughter relationships. On the other hand, one has no trouble finding novels about Portnoy-mother-and-son relationships; and there is a surfeit of father-and-son novels.^[22]

These are questions and concerns that could not be, and were not, asked by previous women's magazine writers.

The language of (maternal) separation and struggle still exists

("All children . . . must separate emotionally from their mothers before they can become healthy, independent adults").^[23] However, it is now often couched in a discourse that not only stresses the commonalities between all women (not solely biologically based) but that (finally!) takes daughters to task for being emotionally responsible for the well-being of that relationship. As Sabert Basescu notes in a dialogue he had with a group of daughters: "You've complained that your mothers had plans for you, but it seems you had plans for your mothers too. If your mothers didn't fit certain molds that you'd like them to fit, you're disappointed. So you don't accept them for what they are either."^[24]

The new concern about women's identity and sense of self produced a discussion of the possibility of mother as role model in a changing society. What was mother able to pass on to her daughter in the age of feminism? "We all know that fathers pass their names and sometimes their ambitions along to their sons. But what do mothers pass on to their daughters? 'My mother gave me recipes and the secret of how to endure,' a friend told me. But like so many other daughters, she also feels she inherited many negative things from her mother—feelings of guilt, a tendency to martyrdom, a mistrust of men."^[25] Yet this aspect of the discussion—the inheritance of submission and domesticity—is more dormant in the seventies than in earlier periods. Unfortunately, it emerges again with real force in the feminist literature of the eighties. But the emphasis in the seventies was much more on understanding commonalities and, more important, understanding the reality of mother's life and mother's options. Fundamental to this was an insistence, after so many years of relative silence, on the simple importance of a daughter's relationship to her mother in forming her own identity, an importance that was now being addressed with language that went beyond the forties bond/separate dichotomies: "Your mother's role as model heightens the intimacy between you. For better or worse, she gives you many of your most important impressions of what it is like to be female."^[26]

There was an explicit understanding being developed that, if we resented or even hated our mothers, there was a social context that helped construct these feelings: "Too often mothers fail to understand and daughters fail to explain that the anger comes, not from what our mothers did or failed to do, but from who they were, from

the image of themselves that they passed along to the daughters they loved. In many instances, our mothers were the first generation of American women to feel trapped in their homes, frustrated in dead-end jobs, bitter about not finishing college. As a result, they expected more from their daughters." Teri Schultz continues to explore the power of this relationship using a new feminist language that recognizes the internalization not only of our mothers, but of sexist assumptions by implication. She explicitly moves away from the separation models by acknowledging the continuities between mothers and daughters in a very social sense: "Every woman wants to love her mother, and every mother wants to be loved by her daughter. Those daughters who say they hate their mothers usually realize at some point that they cannot truly hate them without hating some part of themselves, for each of us has internalized our mother to some extent. She is at the core of our identity, whether we like it or not."^[27] It is hard to overestimate the importance of this shift. For the first time, the relationship between mother and daughter is placed within a social context that acknowledges the often painful reality of the "prefeminist" mother, that relieves her of some of the overwhelming responsibility for her daughter's psyche in the name of a more realistic appraisal of mother's life options and limitations.

This is not to say that the seventies were without their mother-blaming moments. Indeed, one of the unique aspects of women's magazines is the existence, side by side, of contradictory discourses about women in general and mothers and daughters in particular. Even such a conscientious writer as Signe Hammer, although careful to point out "both sides" of the mother/daughter "problem," still holds to the theme of inevitable struggle when she claims, "Some conflict between the generations is inevitable, and hostility between mothers and daughters can be a sign of health, a sign that a daughter is developing normally."^[28] Nevertheless, this author does not resort to the more typical urgings to mothers to "let go." Rather, she speaks in the new voice of female independence, urging both mother and daughter to find their own identities and come to a new mutuality.

Themes of sexual rivalry and jealousy crop up frequently, as in a 1976 article, "Can You Ruin Your Daughter's Sex Life?" The author sees mother's jealousy of daughter arise because "Daughters reach

their bloom just as mothers are beginning to fade, and a mother may well be jealous of her daughter."^[29] One curious thing about this position is the assumption that a middle-aged mother would be jealous of her teenage daughter. This seems a resolutely male perception of female sexuality; it seems ludicrous to imagine that a mature woman would want to return to (or relive, as so many of the articles insist) those horrible and usually unsatisfying years of adolescent sexuality. As any woman knows, the sexuality of a forty-year-old woman is bound to be more developed and personally enhancing than that of a seventeen-year-old girl. The insistence on the mother's envy and jealousy seems a weak remnant of Freudian orthodoxy coupled with a denial of the mother as a sexual being.

Ann Landers joined the fray with a peculiar article, "What To Tell Your Daughter About Women's Lib," that is a mass of contradictions. Landers does acknowledge the changing status of women: "Daughters need help in deciding what they will be because it is no longer true that, like their mothers and grandmothers before them, the majority will grow up to be housewives without even considering alternate lifestyles. What's a mother to do?" Landers answers her own question with uncharacteristic ambiguity. On the one hand, she warns mothers not to encourage their daughters in certain "male" activities, lest "they come off as being terribly unattractive, excessively aggressive, and . . . really turn men off." On the other hand, she argues adamantly for abortion on demand. She rails against the "libbers" and for the ideal of woman as housewife/mother, yet simultaneously praises that central constituent of feminist activism, the pro-choice movement.^[30]

Perhaps the ultimate moment of seventies revisionism comes when the venerable Dr. Spock proffers his apologia to American womanhood in a 1972 Redbook article:

I've been reproached for contributing to the prejudice. A number of years ago, before there was a Women's Liberation Movement, I wrote that girls should be brought up to think of child rearing as exciting and creative work. "Brainwashing!" said the feminists. Of course I should have said—as I honestly believe—"Girls and boys should be brought up to think of child rearing as exciting and creative work. . . . More positively and more importantly, parents should prepare girls for careers throughout their childhood—psychologically and educationally—as they prepare their sons. That's my belief now.^[31]

Sitcom Subversions: Working Daughters and Radical Mothers

One year after Spock bid farewell to his well-meaning paternalism, the wittiest matriarch ever to hit prime time emerged on CBS. The sitcom "Maude," a turning point for the representation of mothers and daughters on television, has not received the attention or the accolades it deserves.^[32] It certainly has not achieved the near cult status of such classic seventies "quality" sitcoms as "All in the Family" (from which "Maude" was a spin-off), "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," and "M*A*S*H." This is not surprising, given the character Maude herself. If Mary Richards used traditional feminine qualities to rethink office politics and women and work questions and Edith Bunker was the stereotypical silly woman with a heart of gold, then Maude was the loud, brazen, brassy Bella Abzug of prime time. She was funny without being self-abnegating, smart without being coy, and contentious without being apologetic. She was, in other words, a radical woman.

"Maude" was also the first prime-time TV sitcom to portray an adult mother and daughter living together. In that, and in so many other ways, this was really a "social issue" sitcom with a sincerity and depth that surpassed that classic of social sitcoms, "All in the Family." There were no fools in "Maude," no buffoons, no sitting targets waiting to be dissected with a dose of Learian liberalism. Even the right-wing character, Arthur, though often buffoonish, was more often than not a relatively articulate spokesman for the small-minded Nixonian conservatism that Maude was always battling. The subject of Maude was not the single girl in the big city, working-class bigotry, or the hellishness of war, but rather the liberal, enlightened family itself. Maude represents the grand reversal of the "domesticoms" of the fifties, in that it locates itself in terms of genre within that trusted environment of the family home and then explores the new configurations and struggles engendered in that space since the late 1960s.

One of the significant dislocations of the traditional nuclear family has most certainly been the growing rates of divorce and single parenthood, two issues that provide narrative grist for the mill of the social sitcom.^[33] Maude was obviously no exception here: she had been married four times before she settled on her current mate, the wry appliance salesman Walter Findlay; and her daugh-

ter was a divorced, twenty-seven-year-old mother of an eight-year-old son when she came to live with Maude and Walter.

The relationship between Maude and her daughter Carol is unlike any I have seen on TV shows. Unlike "Rhoda," which framed the mother/daughter relationship within the more traditional structure of old-fashioned, interfering Jewish mother and daughter struggling to be liberated, "Maude" shows both mother and daughter as feminists and "liberated women." This sets "Maude" apart and in some ways makes it more advanced than the times would suggest. Although Carol often plays the part of spokeswoman for the "new woman," she is by no means alone in this; it is this dialogue between mother and daughter that is so refreshing and enlightening. In one of the best (and most controversial) episodes, Maude has gotten pregnant at age forty-seven and faces the dilemma of whether to have this baby, which she clearly doesn't want, or to have an abortion (legal by this time in the state of New York). Carol urges her mother on: "There is no earthly reason for you to go through this at your age," and she is amazed at Maude's hesitancy, given her politics:

Carol: "Mother, I don't understand your hesitancy. When they made it a law you were for it."

Maude: "Of course, I wasn't pregnant then."

Carol: "Mother, it's ridiculous, my saying this to you . We're free. We finally have the right to decide what we can do with our own bodies."

Maude does go on to have the abortion, with the support of her daughter and her husband.

Although struggle and conflict are openly and humorously acknowledged, they never entail a sense of the need for rift and permanent separation: these two women obviously love each other and, in many ways, are much alike. Several episodes point this out clearly. In "Like Mother, Like Daughter" (1972), Carol has begun dating a man many years her senior, and, importantly, a man Maude used to see before she met Walter. Maude is concerned that Carol will be jilted as she was and, after waiting up for Carol all night, confides her distress to Walter over breakfast:

Maude: "Walter, I am going to put a stop to this right now!"

Walter: "Now look Maude, if you break this up Carol's going to think you're an interfering mother. You want that?"

Figs. 19, 20, 21.
Bea Arthur is the liberal doyenne of East Coast suburbia and Adrienne Barbeau is her 
equally feisty/feminist daughter in the complex, challenging, and always funny "Maude." 
(CBS, photos courtesy of Columbia Pictures and CBS Stills Archive)

Maude: "It's a hazard of the trade Walter. I didn't interfere when she eloped with Pete and it ended in divorce. I've never forgiven myself."

Walter: "Then why didn't you interfere?"

Maude: "I was in Reno at the time divorcing Albert."

First, as in many such scenes, the explicit and humorous discourse of "the interfering mother" helps make it less deadly, less pres criptive and pathologizing. In addition, Maude's statement about her own divorce not only links the experience of mother and daughter but gives the mother a life, so her interference is put in perspective.

In the next scene, Carol has come down the stairs and into the kitchen, clearly not eager to talk. Yet Maude persists, putting her hand on Carol's shoulders and facing her, a stance that is repeated time and time again between mother and daughter throughout the series: "I know you're going to tell me again to mind my own business. But look at it this way: God couldn't be everywhere, that's why he invented mothers." But Carol is having none of it, telling Maude she doesn't intend to see him again anyway because he called her "Maude" last night. Maude assumes it was during lovemaking and is flattered, but it turns out it was during an argument in which Russell (the lover) accused Carol of sounding just like her mother. When Russell emerges to make amends, he is placed physically between the two women, who proceed to demolish him (as an egocentric jerk) and send him out the door. As Maude returns from the doorway, she walks over to Carol: "Good morning honey," "Good morning mother," and they smile, hug, and kiss.

However, the scene doesn't end on that note. Maude continues to tell Carol of her experience with Russell, and Carol comforts her. When Walter walks in to apologize for his jealousy, Carol and Maude are seated on the edge of the couch, one slightly behind the other in a "matching" shot (similar clothes, hairstyles, position on couch, etc.) that is accentuated by the identical warm smile they give Walter during his speech. The women are brought together by a sense of wry sisterhood refracted through the egocentric man they both slept with and by a sense of mutual nurturing and caretaking.

In a 1976 episode entitled "The Election," both Maude and her daughter are working for the Carter campaign. This shared work, although typically providing material for discourses of "enmeshment" and "lack of separation," here is expressed in terms of mutual pride and, always, humor:

Maude: "Oh you know Carol, I just think you're wonderful. The way you have thrown yourself into this presidential campaign."

Carol: "Well, after all, I am your daughter. You know what they say: the acorn doesn't fall far from the political nut."

Maude: "Carol, you know you're getting to be more like me all the time. And some day we're both going to pay for it."

It sounds banal, but the simple statement from a mother to a daughter, "I think you're wonderful," and its response, "I am your daughter," moves us decades away from the agonizing ideologies of separation and struggle. To acknowledge love, closeness, and sameness without being stamped as "overinvolved," "enmeshed," and "immature" is a major step in a feminist direction for the image of the mother/daughter relationship.

Another 1972 episode also depathologizes the stereotype of the interfering mother. Carol has just announced, after being unemployed and suffering sexual harassment while looking for work, that she intends to get married. Maude is understandably upset because Carol has discussed none of this with her.

Walter: "Maude, I don't want Carol to make a mistake any more than you do. But I got a pretty good feeling that you're beginning to lead her life again."

Maude: "Will you do me a favor with your feelings Walter? Save them, and then someday give them all to me together in a lump. In my old age maybe I'll browse through them and find out who you were."

If this event had occurred, say, in "Father Knows Best," the father would have gently showed the mother the error of her meddling ways and led the family into complete harmony. But here, in the 1970s, Maude's humor undercuts Walter's attempt at paternalism (the man who knows best about how to handle both mother and daughter) and implies that, in this universe, mother knows best. Walter continues to play the role of mediator, but it is a role without the ideological power it had previously. When he calmly tells Maude that "Carol's a grown woman. You're her mother but you can't talk to her like her mother," Maude swiftly dispatches him with a biting remark and proceeds to deal with her daughter in her own way, which clearly does not include enacting this cloying psychological dictum of "loving and letting go," as she illustrates when she comes up to Carol's room:

Maude: "Honey do you mind if I come in? If I promise. . . ."

Carol: "Promise what?"

Maude: "If I promise not to talk like a mother?"

Carol: "All right."

Maude (strides over to Carol): "If I promise not to talk about the way you're wrecking your life."

When Carol reproaches her, Maude asks, "Would it disturb you terribly if I cried? Very quietly?" Then she gives a delightful speech, pleading for her daughter's attention: "Carol! I've been your mother for 27 years. I carried you for nine months before then. I lived with your father for 2 years longer than I wanted to because I thought you needed him . . . so don't try to keep me to some promise I made a few minutes ago when I was half out of my mind with grief." Here Maude undercuts the traditional maternal martyr theme by introducing her own humorous note regarding Carol's father and the overstatement of the grief. The issues in their discussion of Carol's impending marriage are important: Maude doesn't want her daughter to "settle"—to marry for anything less than love, even though they both acknowledge the hardships of single parenthood. Ironically, the reversal here is complete: in contrast to images of earlier years, the mother is arguing for love and integrity while the daughter is arguing for compliance and compromise. But in the mother's victory (Carol doesn't marry) is a victory for all women, both mother and daughter.

"Maude" remains unique in that it acknowledges the scripts already written for mothers and daughters (as Maude says to Carol, "Children resent and mothers interfere. That comes with the territory.") while implicitly challenging their authenticity. The traditional scripts, with their emphasis on separation and the inevitability of discord, certainly have no narrative space for an adult mother and her adult daughter living and thriving together. "Maude" takes on June and Margaret and Donna and, in doing so, challenges not only the mythology of the perfect mother (who knows that father really does know best), but the mythology of the demon mother, too. Maude insists on being involved in her daughter's life, and her daughter insists on being involved in Maude's life.

Although Rhoda and her mother do not live together, as Maude and Carol do, Ida Morgenstern is nevertheless a persistent pres-

ence in "Rhoda." In many ways, "Rhoda" is a much more conservative and traditional series than "Maude." I would have expected otherwise because one show depicts the classic feminist subject of the seventies (single working girl on her own in the big city), and the other is located firmly in the heartland of domestic sitcoms: the suburban family home. Yet the centrality in "Rhoda" of the "search" for a male partner (indeed, just look how quickly a husband is found for her, placing her sister Brenda in the role of perpetually dateless man seeker) effectively devalues and limits the exploration of either the mother/daughter or the sister/sister relationship in a meaningful way. Even numerically speaking, "Rhoda" has very few episodes devoted to exploring this relationship in a narratively significant way, especially when compared to "Maude." In addition, the choice to make Ida so stereotypically "the Jewish mother" often took the possible depth and poignancy out of the interactions between the two women.

In the early episodes, Rhoda and her mother are largely sparring partners (indeed, the battle metaphors abound when Rhoda and Brenda describe their mother) competing in a lightweight battle of goodhearted and warm generational boxing. In later episodes, there are signs that the relationship is being depicted for something more than knowing and guaranteed chuckles. Perhaps it was in response to the declining ratings after the incredibly boring marriage to the uninteresting character of Joe, but for whatever reasons, several 1976 and 1977 episodes begin to get beyond the obvious.

Generally, the interactions between Rhoda and her mother center on the mother arriving unexpectedly at Rhoda and Brenda's apartment building and making a variety of critical remarks about their apartment, their clothes, the men in their lives, their weight, and so forth. There is usually a bit of playful banter, and everyone ends up laughing and cheery at the end. The mother/daughter relationship is typically defined within the narrow terms of loud, interfering, guilt-making but well-meaning mother and loving and tolerant but often exasperated daughters. While "Maude" overturns Donna and Margaret, "Rhoda" departs from the familial setting but, in many ways, recaptures the spirit of working girl in the big city series such as "Our Miss Brooks" and "That Girl."

Yet "Rhoda" occasionally slipped outside this generic straitjacket, allowing for a richer interaction between mother and

Fig. 22.
One of several spinoffs from the highly innovative "Mary Tyler Moore Show," 
"Rhoda" was a peculiar cross between "That Girl" and "The Goldbergs." 
(CBS; photo courtesy of Photofest)

daughter than the usual faintly humorous generational and ethnic repartee. In the episode where Rhoda is getting separated from Joe, Ida is allowed to emerge as more than a caricature. Rhoda, afraid of her mother's disappointment, does not immediately tell her, but Ida finds out anyway from Joe. She immediately goes over to Rhoda's to try and help, and Rhoda resists, insisting that she's fine:

Rhoda: "I'm telling you that I'm fine. Can't you see that I'm fine?"

Ida (tremulously, with an atypically small and quiet voice): "Rhoda . . . I love you . . . don't lock me out."

Rhoda (long pause): "I'm terrified. I have never been so scared in my entire life."

Ida (moving over to her, she takes her in her arms and holds her while talking): "No, no sweetheart, no, don't be scared. I'm here, I'm here." (Rhoda is now sitting on the edge of the couch so that they are the same height.)

Rhoda: "Don't you be scared either, OK?"

Ida: "Yeah, right, listen. There has to be something that I can do for you. You know in my day my mother would have said do anything to save the marriage, make any kind of adjustments, put up with anything. I, I guess that doesn't go now anymore, does it?"

Rhoda: "No Ma, no, it doesn't."

Ida then goes to call her husband to say she's staying with Rhoda for a few days, and Rhoda protests loudly:

Ida: "That's no good huh? (She looks at Rhoda, who gently shakes her head.) Right. (She puts down the phone.) That would have been good for me but, uh, that's no good for you, huh? OK, well, uh, I guess the best thing I can do then is to uh leave you alone."

Rhoda: "That's right ma."

Ida gets ready to leave, they kiss goodnight, and, as she is halfway out the door, Rhoda calls to her, "Ma?" Ida turns back, "Yeah?" Rhoda says, "Stick around?" Ida comes back in to her ("Oh yeah"), they embrace, and the image fades out.

This scene is interesting on a number of levels. First, it is definitely atypical of the series as a whole, which generally tended toward the more secure sitcom laughs via the caricatured mother. Nevertheless, this scene references both Ida's needs (e.g., to reframe "interfering" in terms of love and caring) and the new feminist era ("You know in my day. . . ."). This signifies a theme common to many of the "new woman" series in 1970s TV: the daughter's life as fundamentally different from the mother's. The interaction between mother and daughter is thus framed through this one historical disjuncture.

In "One Day at a Time," we get this two ways—divorced single parent Ann's life is different from her mother's, but her own girls extend this trajectory of liberation. Much of the narrative of this series centers on the trials and tribulations of raising two adolescent daughters, and the series was quick to feature the context of single parenthood. In a 1976 episode entitled "Ann's First Decision," the reality of Ann's status as single mother becomes the subject of the episode. Daughter Julie has assumed that her "liberated mother" would allow her to go on a camping trip with a group of girls and boys. When mom refuses, hysterical teenage Julie runs off to be

with her father, and mom feels like she made a mistake: "it's really something. For the first seventeen years of my life, my father made the decisions. And the next seventeen, my husband made the decisions. The first time in my life I make a decision on my own and I blow it." This statement surely had enormous resonance for a whole generation of women undergoing divorces, sustaining the inevitable drop in income, and suddenly being faced with responsibilities and positions that had formerly been closed to them. Yet the resolution of this mother's dilemma comes from a sadly obvious source: her boyfriend. Boyfriend and divorce lawyer David gently points out to her the error of her ways, and only then is she able to sit down with her girls and give a speech that sounds more like a team pep rally than a family dialogue ("Stick with me, huh? We'll make it . . .").

Although generally an uninspired show, "One Day at a Time" was innovative simply for what it was: a single-parent family with an unrepentant working mother. By existing at all, it must have given validation to the thousands of women and children going through that experience and fighting against the ideologies of "broken homes" and "latchkey children."^[34] Daughters Barbara and Julie were shown engaged in the responsibilities familiar to children of single parents (cooking, cleaning, watching out for each other) and were not summarily identified as "overly responsible" or "parentified" children. Indeed, "One Day at a Time" went out of its way to portray them as "normal" American teenagers, not in any way "afflicted" by the stigma of living in a single-parent family.

A made-for-TV movie, "Like Mom, Like Me" (1978), also deals positively with single-parent families. As in "one Day at a Time," mother's feminist coming of age is paralleled with that of her adolescent daughter. As mother searches to "discover herself" and explore her sexual independence, her young daughter simultaneously works out her own developing sexuality in a social terrain new to both women. Linda Lavin plays a woman who has come to a new city to take a job as an English professor at the local college after her husband has run off with one of his students. The intimacy and mutual support between mother and daughter is apparent, as is the importance of the absent (and much loved by daughter) father. Although mom initially gets "punished" for her independent sexuality when she spends a late evening with a visiting professor (leaving

her worried daughter to eat her dinner alone and subsequently call the police), she nevertheless refuses to reunite with her husband: "I don't ever want to be so dependent upon anybody, that I feel that my life is lost without him. . . . I do have someone else finally. . . . I have me." Daughter is joined with mother in this early feminist quest for independence by a remarkable speech extolling the virtues of single parenthood and the mutuality of mother/daughter nurturing. Although problematic in its identification of female independence with sexuality (we see very little of mom's new teaching career), this TV movie nevertheless refuses the bond/separate motif, instead opting for an inscription of both mother and daughter within the new discourses of female self-identity and familial change. In so doing, the film ends not with a rupture between mother and daughter, but with a continuation of a genuine and reciprocal bond of care and concern.

The difference with a series like "Maude" is that feminism and the women's movement are active signifiers in the overall narrative, whereas neither "Rhoda" nor "One Day at a Time" gives us a sense of these women's involvement in the women's movement or that they have been influenced by it in any significant way. Indeed, Rhoda seems to have left much of her sisterhood behind when she left Minneapolis and moved back to New York, and Ann Romano seems rather like a hipper version of the "perfect moms" of the 1950s like Donna and June. As Ella Taylor notes, feminism was active in defining the new features of Ann's life, but so too was the newly resurgent language of psychology: "Ann learns to be an adult, a new woman, and a new kind of parent. If feminism helps her to redefine the terms of her life, so too does a highly contemporary psychological sensibility, which comes to usurp the language of ethics as a basis for action."^[35]

Although Carol's life is different from mother Maude's, it is a difference that they share rather than a difference one owns at the other's expense (either humorous expense or otherwise). In one episode, when Maude first starts seeing Walter, they contemplate living together. Importantly, Walter voices the traditional love and marriage ideology. Maude and her daughter are represented equally as women warriors in the same suburban battlefield, turning over the last remnants of charred domesticity in their march toward a feminist future.

Brave New Movies and Rehashed Reruns

If "Maude" was a turning point for the representation of mothers and daughters in television, then the 1978 hit, An Unmarried Woman, starring Jill Clayburgh, Alan Bates, and Lisa Lucas and directed by Paul Mazursky, was similarly a turning point in the medium of film. It has come to be regarded as the archetype of the "new women's cinema" of the 1970s, which included films such as Girlfriends, The Turning Point, and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore . What marked these films as different from their cinematic predecessors was their explicit attention to the emergent women's movement and the issues it provoked.

An Unmarried Woman, typically understood in terms of its primary narrative of marriage, divorce, and reconstitution of life as "liberated" woman, is quite instructive in its parallel narrative of the relationship between the central character, Jill, and her smart-aleck teenage daughter, Patty. Importantly, this film does parallel the lives of the mother and the daughter, an unusual strategy for narrating the mother/daughter relationship. In earlier films, this relationship is rarely analyzed synchronically: the daughter is shown either to surpass the bad and denying mother (i.e., not repeat her life) or not and therefore to be her victim in some way. An Unmarried Woman allows us to see the emotional and political development of mother and daughter simultaneously, placing neither as victim or victimizer and firmly anchoring the ins and outs of their own relationship to the new social milieu of feminism.

Although certainly not the first film to discuss a woman's struggle for self-definition or to show a loving, mature relationship between a mother and daughter (although there are remarkably few examples of this), this film nevertheless does these things with an explicit referencing of the women's movement. If ever there was a "grand signifier" in a film, it must certainly be feminism in An Unmarried Woman . Indeed, we witness consciousness-raising sessions, separation and divorce, feminist psychotherapy, women and work questions, and a host of other issues deemed of concern to the new women's movement.

The daughter's sophistication is not simply the product of liberal, seventies parents, but is precisely concerned with a new sense of what it means to be a woman, particularly with regard to sexuality.

In one scene, mother and daughter are discussing the daughter's relationship with her boyfriend, and the dialogue expresses not only the daughter's new choices (e.g., not to marry, to be actively sexual), but also the reality of a familial world increasingly being redefined around divorce and single parenthood:

Mother: "I think you're serious about Phil."

Daughter: "Mom, I'm still a virgin, if that's what you meant."

Mother: "That's not what I meant. I'm glad you told me. I just meant that you like Phil."

Daughter: "I like Phil. I'm not going to marry him. I'm never getting married."

Mother: "You will."

Daughter: "Don't be so sure."

Mother: "Why not?"

Daughter: "Why should I? I mean, everybody I know that's married is either miserable or divorced. I don't want that."

Mother: "Oh Patty, that's ridiculous. There's lots of happily married couples."

Daughter: "Name three."

Mother: "Uhh, I'll have to think about it."

The mother cannot respond with the traditional pat answer, and the next scene reveals the mother's marital problems and her abandonment by her husband. This reinforces the daughter's perceptions of love and marriage.

In a later scene, the mother has come home to see Patty locked in a passionate embrace with her boyfriend. Her response is out of control, as she quickly admits to Patty after she has settled down:

Daughter: "God, what is it with you?"

Mother: "I'm sorry. God. Oh, God. It's just confusing. I'm sorry I screamed at you Patty. I'm sorry."

Daughter: "It's all right. I just don't understand why you get so upset."

Mother: "I just can't be your father."

Daughter: "So just be my mother."

Tied up in this exchange is an acknowledgment of the mother's confusion not only about her daughter's sexuality and how to be a single

parent, but her own confusion about how to be an "unmarried woman."^[36] The scene ends with both women checking out each other's "OK-ness." By explicitly discussing this "confusion," the mother and daughter simultaneously depathologize and demystify the mother's outburst.

In An Unmarried Woman, the ideologies of angst, separation, and generational dislocation cease to exert themselves on this mother and daughter. Mother is not punished for being sexual; she does not lose or ruin her daughter as a result of her assertion of a sexual self. Indeed, in the scene where Erica brings her lover Saul home to dinner, the final moment is between mother and daughter, as they play the piano and sing "Maybe I'm Amazed." The two women are locked in the frame together in a medium close-up two-shot that excludes the unseen Saul. As the camera pulls back, they burst into laughter, and the image fades to black. Thus is the sexual woman reunited with the loving mother.

One year before An Unmarried Woman, another film—this one more explicitly about mothers and daughters—was made that was as melodramatic and cloying as Woman was low-keyed and engaging. Herbert Ross's The Turning Point, about two women friends whose lives diverge when one (Anne Bancroft) continues her dancing career and the other (Shirley MacLaine) marries and has kids, may be most remembered for its grotesque "catfight" between the two central characters. The thrashing, kicking brawl between these women on the roof of Lincoln Center sets the general tone for this film. Much more than An Unmarried Woman, The Turning Point expresses a reading of "woman's situation" in the seventies that is clearly patriarchal and, not surprisingly, remains with us today, albeit in somewhat different language. The new generation daughter is positioned in the middle of what is here constructed as "the female dilemma": family versus work, domestic happiness and professional disappointment versus personal loneliness and occupational accomplishment.^[37] The narrative structure thus catches her between these dichotomies.

In so many ways, this film recapitulates the dichotomies it sets out to explore and reproduces the more traditional dichotomies of mother/woman that films like An Unmarried Woman more successfully challenged. For example, the tension between Deedee (MacLaine) and both her daughter Amelia and her friend Emma is

Fig. 23.
Mother and daughter mellow out in early feminist togetherness in  An 
Unmarried Woman . (20th Century-Fox, 1978; photo courtesy of Movie Star News)

initiated when Deedee accompanies daughter Amelia to New York to study dance. Parallel love stories emerge, Amelia falling for the smooth Russian ballet star (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov) and Deedee rekindling an old affair. When Amelia returns home devastated one evening after witnessing her lover with another woman, she finds her mother absent, as loyal father calls to check in. From this moment on, the daughter becomes infatuated with Emma (Bancroft) as pseudomom, thus leading us narratively to associate Deedee's infidelity (her womanness) with her decline as a maternal figure for the daughter. The narrative plays out perfectly in accordance with this grand script: Deedee is able to win back her daughter's affection only after she begs her forgiveness for the affair and, as if that wasn't enough, has a poignant reunion with steadfast hubby, a reunion the daughter looks on, literally, with approval.

The Turning Point recapitulates yet another traditional theme of mother/daughter narratives, one that has found much currency in recent feminist writing. Not only is daughter Amelia placed syn-

chronically as the figure of new woman (career versus family), but she is located diachronically as the person who will successfully redeem her mother's lost and neglected dreams, as Emma says to Deedee during an argument: "I don't want to be anybody's mother. I think of Amelia as a friend. And one reason I tried to help, stupid me, I thought it would make you happy if your daughter became what you wanted to be and never could be!"

With the onset of feminism in the late sixties and early seventies, mothers and daughters began to emerge as having a relationship worthy of public discussion and representation. For the first time in television, for example, the relationship itself begins to demand narrative attention, rather than just being part of the background of the domestic bliss sitcoms of the fifties. For the first time, there is something to look at, something to analyze, a relationship that becomes socially imprinted as important and vital.

Although both television and women's magazines were relatively quick to pick up on the specifically familial aspects of changing sexual politics, film of the sixties and seventies seemed almost to ignore completely the importance of the mother/daughter relationship. Not until the late seventies and early eighties does film once again explore mothers and daughters.

Clearly, the media have had quite different responses to the development of the women's movement and are certainly not, as many critics are quick to assume, monolithic entities that simply reinforce each other with a shared ideological stance. Although this discrepancy between the different media cannot be easily explained, several reasons come to mind. First, TV was, and is, primarily a domestic medium. It is viewed in the home, and the subject matter of television itself is often domestic and/or familial. Therefore, given that the mother/daughter relationship has been primarily understood as a domestic and familial one, it stands to reason that the medium of television could perhaps explore this relationship in greater depth than did film.

With the development of the contemporary women's movement, it seems that television and film explored different aspects of the social/sexual transformations and dislocations emerging in the late sixties and seventies. Film primarily chose to explore the implications of changing gender positions via an examination of single in-

dependent women. Although the "new woman" was also a subject of the TV formulation of feminism, television was much more apt to delve into the familial changes engendered in and through the women's movement.

With the maturation of television as a medium in the sixties and the sitcom as a genre in the seventies, television to a certain extent replaced film as the epitome of popular entertainment. As film costs rose and film became more and more specialized (film as art, on the one hand, and film as special effects/teen love, on the other), television emerged as a medium more attuned to the diverse tenors of the times. The immediacy of television and its lower production costs (via the subsidizing by advertisers) allowed television, contrary to the critics who rail against its banalities, not only to be closer to the contemporary conditions of its diverse audience, but also to enact narratives that were more responsive to the prevailing social conditions than film.

Women's magazines, as we have seen, played out in their pages the dialectical drama of feminism and the resistance to it by allowing these contradictory voices to permeate the discussion. The same old debates often continued (Should mother work? Why do mothers and daughters quarrel? How should the difficult adolescent years be handled?), but the women's magazines began to shift the discourse to one specifically engaged with the women's movement. For example, although Ann Landers addresses the traditional subject of how to communicate with your daughter, she does so under the more specific aegis of how to speak of this new liberation movement. Very few magazines could afford to ignore a social/sexual movement that was occupying the minds and bodies of many of their educated, middle-class readers.

It is more than coincidental that the book that broke the waters, The Feminine Mystique, was written by a women's magazine writer, for the issues that the women's movement focused on (beyond that of economic justice)—issues of family life, marital happiness, how to be a mother and what motherhood means, the "trapped" housewife, sexual pleasure, personal relationships—had all been central aspects of the women's magazine gestalt for years. So the extent to which the magazines included such a wide and diverse range of opinions, positions, and arguments on the emerg-

ing "woman question" of the late 1960s and 1970s is not surprising. Indeed, the genre that would have explored this relationship most in film—the melodrama—had declined by the late 1950s and had virtually disappeared by the 1960s, being replaced with genres less available to the representation of a female subject, much less one in relation to another female subject.