1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 225.

2. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963).

3. Betty Friedan, The Second Stage (New York: Summit Books, 1981).

4. Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self (New York: Delacorte Press, 1977); Colette Dowling, Perfect Women: Hidden Fears of Inadequacy and the Drive to Perform (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), and The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981); Robin Norwood, Women Who Love Too Much (New York: Pocket Books, 1989).

5. Evelyn Bassoff, Mothers and Daughters: Loving and Letting Go (New York: New American Library, 1988), 215.

6. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs, vol. 1, no. 1 (1975), 1-29, esp. 15. See also Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985).

7. Ewen, Immigrant Women .

8. This book is not the place to examine these historical changes. To do so completely, I would need to look at a number of social phenomena, including the new consumerism of the 1920s and its re-elaboration in the 1950s, when both mothers and daughters were identified with the realm of the domestic and targeted as potential consumers of domestic products. I would also need to stress the popularization of Freudian psychology—indeed, of psychology in general—and how the psychological framework continue

came to define certain social and familial relations, such as the mother/daughter relation; the growth of women's participation in the wage economy; the removal of the home as a site of production; and the growth and consolidation of industrial capitalism.

9. The early and mid-1970s really mark the beginning of a literature on women and representation coterminous with the growth of the women's movement.

10. This brief discussion is limited to theories of visual representation and culture generally and thus avoids dealing with the enormous literature that makes up the field of feminist literary criticism. Feminist literary criticism has, to some extent, stood separate from the more general work on women and culture and women and representation. The relationship between this field of literary criticism and feminist theories of visual representation awaits further analysis.

11. Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 4.

12. See the bibliography for complete references. See also Suzanna Danuta Walters, ''Material Girls: Feminism and Cultural Studies," Current Perspectives in Social Theory, in press, which reviews and critically evaluates feminist cultural theory.

1. There has been an outpouring in recent years of feminist scholarship on the forties and fifties. Particularly helpful to me, with their emphasis on cultural representations of women during these years, has been the work of Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), and Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

2. Stella Dallas was first a 1915 popular novel, which was turned into a film by Henry King in 1925 and then later by King Vidor in 1937. It was also one of the longest running radio serials, playing on NBC from 1937 to 1955. The early twentieth century origins may have a great deal to do with the film's sympathetic rendering of maternal love, insofar as its reference is to a sort of preindustrial "cult of true womanhood" rather than psychoanalytic angst.

3. Not only were there a great many class-conscious films during the thirties, but both film and magazine fiction depicted independent, courageous heroines struggling with careers and negotiating the urban jungle. continue

See Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963). Nevertheless, as both Honey and May, Homeward Bound, point out, if these career women ever attempted to maintain their independence after marriage, they were severely vilified.

4. E. Ann Kaplan, "Mothering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal Melodrama and the Women's Film 1910-1940," in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 133.

5. Linda Williams, "Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama," in Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 316.

6. Kaplan, 133.

7. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940's (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 77.

8. Williams, "Something Else Besides a Mother," 312-313.

9. Again, this scene, like many others, sets up the intersection of class and mothering very explicitly. As Stella says, "You're the kind of mother any girl could be proud of. . . ." The entire mise-en-scène agrees with her: compared to the elegant and relaxed Mrs. Morrison, Stella does appear tacky, overdressed, and socially awkward.

10. Williams, "Something Else Besides a Mother," 313.

11. The triumph here is very much like the sacrificial "triumph" of the nineteenth-century "true woman."

12. The mother is here played by Bette Davis, whose character is named Charlotte and whose daughter is named Tina. Several years later, Davis was to play the beleaguered daughter Charlotte whose "adoptive" daughter is named Tina in the film Now, Voyager .

13. There is actually a very interesting early silent film called Dancing Mothers (1926) in which an actress mother finds her life lonely and curtailed after her marriage to a successful banker. Concerned over her daughter's "wild ways," she plots to steal away her daughter's cad of a boyfriend, only to have him fall in love with her. Her affair causes a break with her daughter and husband, but they try to win her back. The film ends on a highly unusual note in that the wayward mother does not return to the familial nest, but rather indicts both the daughter and the husband for their selfishness and goes off to make her own way.

14. Alice Austin White, "Modern Daughters," Forum, January 1932, 62, 64.

15. Helena Lefroy Caperton, "How We Raised Our Six Daughters," Woman's Home Companion, December 1930, 38. break

16. Mary Ormsbee Whitton, "If I Were That Girl's Mother!" Parents' Magazine, August 1932, 17.

17. Marian Castle, "Hard-boiled Mothers: Yesterday's Flapper as Today's Modern Parent," The Woman's Journal, April 1931, 35.

18. Estelle Reilly, "Today's Daughters," Woman's Home Companion, July 1937, 22.

19. Dorothy Blake, "She Never Tells Me Anything!" Parents' Magazine, August 1938, 65.

20. Inez Haynes Irwin, "Insuring Your Daughter's Success," Woman's Home Companion, December 1936, 22, 116, 120.

21. Eleanor Boykin, "Should Mothers Be Matchmakers?" Parents' Magazine, August 1936, 20, 69.

22. Lovisa C. Wagoner, "This Business of Being a Mother," Parents' Magazine, January 1930, 20, 47.

23. Barbara Beattie, "Preparing Your Daughter for Adolescence," Parents' Magazine, October 1929, 71.

24. Ruth Hawthorne, "Mothers and Daughters," Delineator, vol. 119 (October 1931), 9.

25. Ibid., 38.

26. Michael Renov, quoted in Doane, The Desire to Desire, 33.

27. Edward A. Strecker, "What's Wrong with American Mothers?" Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1946, 15.

28. Ibid., 88.

29. Charlotte's most prominent hobby is making what appear to be cloisonne boxes. This film could not be more overladen with Freudian metaphors—boxes, attics, stairways, the fetishizing of legs.

30. Indeed, there was a whole genre of "psychiatrist" films, such as Spellbound and Gaslight, in which the psychoanalytic motif firmly entrenched itself in the American psyche.

31. Barbara Ehrenreich and Diedre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979), examine thoroughly and thoughtfully how the reign of the experts developed alongside the rise of popular psychology in the 1940s and 1950s.

32. Maria LaPlace, "Producing and Consuming the Woman's Film: Discursive Struggle in Now, Voyager, " in Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 163.

33. Maria LaPlace has convincingly argued that Charlotte is not only an advertisement for a psychologically "correct" motherhood, but that she is an advertisement for a complete "before" and "after" woman, replete with new clothes, hairstyle, and sophisticated demeanor. The relationship continue

between Now, Voyager and both the new psychology and the new consumerism is striking indeed.

34. Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 92.

35. Florence Howitt, "Do You Know Everything in Your Daughter's Head?" Good Housekeeping, January 1945, 28.

36. In her biography, which includes a running commentary by the star herself, Bette Davis comments that she received a great deal of fan mail after Now, Voyager from "children of possessive mothers, whose lives had been ruined as was Charlotte's before meeting Jacquith; also many from mothers admitting their similar mistakes with their children." Whitney Stine, Mother Goddam (New York: Berkley Books, 1974), 175. Clearly, the ideology of maternal evil had, and still has, quite a bit of popular appeal.

37. Much has been made of this odd mixture of noir and melodrama. Specifically, it has been argued that the omniscient voice of the male detective in the noir sequences serves to undercut the female narrative of Mildred's own "rags to riches" story. Although I agree with this observation, here I focus on the construction of the mother/daughter relationship within the film, assuming the more general point, already sufficiently argued, about the dominance of the male point of view.

38. Anderson, Wartime Women, 91.

39. Linda Williams, "Feminist Film Theory: Mildred Pierce and the Second World War," in E. Deidre Pribram, ed., Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Video (London: Verso, 1988), 17-18, 25.

40. Kaplan, "Mothering, Feminism and Representation," 134.

41. Anderson, Wartime Women, 94-95.

42. J. Edgar Hoover, "Mothers—Our Only Hope," Woman's Home Companion, January 1944, 20, 21.

43. Enid A. Niquette, "Daughter's in the Kitchen Now," Parents' Magazine, August 1943, 54.

44. Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter, 117.

45. Ibid., 56.

46. Ibid., 124.

47. Josephine Von Miklos, "Girls in Overalls," Parents' Magazine, March 1943, 22 +; Stella B. Applebaum, "War Jobs for Mothers?" Parents' Magazine, February 1943, 17 +.

48. One assumes the time period is roughly the twenties or perhaps a bit earlier because the film opens with "several decades ago," and it was made in 1945. break

49. This is also true of Stella Dallas, as well as films such as I Remember Mama and Little Women .

50. Williams, "Feminist Film Theory: Mildred Pierce, " 129.

51. Elsie McCormick, "Sometimes Mothers Talk Too Much," Good Housekeeping, September 1943, 25.

52. Andrea Walsh, Women's Film and Female Experience 1940-1950 (New York: Praeger, 1984), 26.

1. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 28.

2. Donald N. Rothblatt, Daniel C. Garr, and Jo Sprague, The Suburban Environment and Women (New York: Praeger, 1979), 50.

3. Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues 1945-1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 4.

4. Rothblatt, Garr, and Sprague, The Suburban Environment, 50.

5. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 11.

6. Ibid., 8-9, 18-19, 164.

7. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 212.

8. Warren Susman, with Edward Griffin, "Did Success Spoil the United States? Dual Representations in Postwar America," in Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 22.

9. The number of television sets purchased is a good indication of the enormous expansion of TV as a form of popular entertainment: "Sales of sets jumped from three million during the entire decade of the 1940s to over five million a year during the 1950s." George Lipsitz, "The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programs," Camera Obscura, vol. 16 (January 1988), 83.

10. George Lipsitz, "The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television Programming," in May, Recasting America, 93.

11. Harrison, On Account of Sex, 6.

12. Bruno Bettelheim, "Fathers Shouldn't Try To Be Mothers," Parents' Magazine, October 1956, 125.

13. Mary Beth Haralovich, "Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker," Quarterly Review of Film & Video, vol. 2 (1989), 62.

14. E. Ann Kaplan, "Mothering, Feminism and Representation: The continue

Maternal in Melodrama and the Woman's Film 1910-1940," in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 130.

15. Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper & Row, 1947), 363-364.

16. Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War Two (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 175.

17. Dorothy Lee, "What Does Homemaking Mean To You?" Parents' Magazine , January 1947, 89.

18. Serafina Bathrick, "The True Woman and the Family-Film: The Industrial Production of Memory" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1980), 224.

19. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 84-85.

20. Ibid., 88.

21. Ibid., 86.

22. Nina C. Leibman, "Leave Mother Out: The Fifties Family in American Film and Television," Wide Angle , vol. 10 (1988), 30-31, 26.

23. Ibid., 31.

24. Haralovich, "Sitcoms and Suburbs," 64.

25. Several writers have examined the manifestations of McCarthyism in popular culture. See especially Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial Press, 1982), and Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980).

26. May, Homeward Bound , 208.

27. The title sequence, with the song in the background, depicts what appear to be diamonds dropping down and forming a pile, representing the falseness of Lora's fame and fortune.

28. Interestingly, in both films, the badness of the daughters is signified by their becoming singer/dancers in sleazy nightclubs for leering men. Both mothers witness the objectification of the daughter as an object of the male gaze. In both cases, the maternal gaze loses out to the male gaze.

29. Elaine Tyler May, "Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb," in May, Recasting America , 155-156.

30. Clifford E. Clark, Jr., "Ranch-House Suburbia: Ideals and Realities," in May, Recasting America , 173.

31. The doctor as voice of reason, justice, and clarity in a hazy world is a constant in films of the 1940s and 1950s (e.g., Now, Voyager, Peyton Place, All That Heaven Allows ). break

32. Government policies supported the development of the suburban nuclear family, with government supported mortgages, subsidies for roads to the suburbs, the creation of housing acts, support for dependent children, and the encouragement of "buying on time." Susman and Griffin, "Did Success Spoil the United States?" Eugenia Kaledin, Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984).

33. Liebman, "Leave Mother Out," 31.

34. Constance J. Foster, "A Mother of Boys Says: Raise Your Girl To Be a Wife," Parents' Magazine , September 1956, 44, 43.

35. Ibid., 113, 44, 113.

36. Marjorie Marks, "Be Popular with Your Daughter," Woman's Home Companion , June 1950, 105.

37. Jo Martin Wagner, "There Are Only 37 Things Wrong with My Daughter," Good Housekeeping , October 1955, 309.

1. Sara Evans, Personal Politics (New York: Knopf, 1979).

2. Ella Taylor, Prime Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1.

3. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies , 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 323.

4. David Considine, The Cinema of Adolescence (Jefferson, NC: Mcfarland, 1985), 64-65.

5. Ibid., 67-68.

6. David Marc sees these sixties sitcoms as examples of a sort of "deep escapism": "[D]uring the sixties, faced with more cultural ambiguity than the genre dared handle, the sitcom went into what might be called a period of 'deep escapism.' If the suburbo-realist domesticoms of the fifties had strived to portray a vision of the 'likely,' the next generation of sitcoms . . . seemed utterly indifferent to verisimilitude." David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 128-129.

7. The exceptions include "Petticoat Junction," which didn't exactly concern itself with relationships at all; "Peyton Place," which only "placed" ratings-wise one season; and "Here's Lucy," where the mother and daughter were wholly related via the supposedly humorous playing up of generational differences. Lucy as mother simply did not work, nor was it funny.

8. As TV critic Taylor has noted, the early 1970s witnessed a shift away from a TV schedule designed simply to attract the widest possible audi- soft

ence and toward the specification of targeted audiences. It is in this marketing context that the new "women's sitcoms" of the 1970s emerged. Ella Taylor, Prime Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

9. Patricia Coffin, "Memo To: The American Woman," Look , January 11, 1966, 16, 17.

10. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, "An Answer to the Attacks on Motherhood," McCall's , June 1965, 165.

11. Ann Landers, "A Sickness of Our Times," in Forum "Are Girls Getting Too Aggressive?" The PTA Magazine , September 1966, 5.

12. David Lester, "Are You Pushing Your Daughter into Too-Early Marriage?" Good Housekeeping , October 1961, 217.

13. Ibid., 216.

14. Ibid., 218.

15. "My Problem and How I Solved It: Mother and Daughter," Good Housekeeping , June 1962, 17. This section is written by anonymous editors, often with the aid of social service organizations, in this case, the Family Services Association of America.

16. Norman M. Lobsenz, "Are Working Wives Hurting or Helping Their Families?" Redbook , July 1961, 31.

17. Elizabeth Schmidt, "The Best Mothers Aren't Martyrs," Parents' Magazine , May 1961, 41.

18. Ibid., 78.

19. Ibid.

20. Virgil Damon and Isabella Taves, "The War Between Mother and Daughter," Look , January 11, 1966, 30, 34.

21. Janet Kole, "Eight Successful Women Discuss Motherhood," Harper's Bazaar , October 1976, 114.

22. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, "Finding the Way To Be Friends," McCall's , October 1975, 94.

23. Teri Schultz, "The Feelings Too Many Daughters Are Afraid To Face," Redbook , October 1976, 183.

24. Sabert Basescu, "Why So Many Women Can't Stand Their Own Mothers," Redbook , June 1970, 185.

25. Schultz, "The Feelings Too Many Daughters Are Afraid To Face," 108.

26. Myron Brenton, "Mothers and Daughters," Seventeen , December 1971, 92.

27. Schultz, "The Feelings Too Many Daughters Are Afraid To Face," 188.

28. Signe Hammer, "Hostility: Why You Hate Your Mother," Harper's Bazaar , October 1976, 120. break

29. Helen Singer Kaplan, "Can You Ruin Your Daughter's Sex Life?" Harper's Bazaar , October 1976, 84.

30. Ann Landers, "What To Tell Your Daughter About Women's Lib," Today's Health , October 1971, 53.

31. Benjamin Spock, "Should Girls Expect To Have Careers?" Redbook , March 1972, 50, 52.

32. "Maude" was a consistently popular show. It ran from 1972 to 1978, and, except for its final two seasons, it always placed in the top ten of the Nielsen ratings.

33. "Maude" is not alone in this. Many other sitcoms of the 1970s centered on divorced women—with or without children ("Rhoda," post Joe, "Phyllis," "One Day at a Time").

34. I remember avidly watching the series even though I never really thought much of it. I often found it unfunny and rather insipid; yet, as the daughter of a single parent with two teenage sisters of my own, I felt "One Day at a Time" legitimized and validated a family form that was consistently underrepresented in popular culture. My family may not have been as relentlessly cheery and gung-ho as the Romanos (after all, they were Italian, and we were Jewish), but I too knew what it meant to learn how to be responsible to my siblings and to my mother in an entirely different way than before her divorce. I suspect many of my generation felt a similar resonance. It's heartening to be represented , even if that representation is lacking aesthetically and politically.

35. Ella Taylor, Prime Time Families , 89.

36. "One Day at a Time," about a divorced mother with two teenage daughters, also introduces this new configuration of single parenthood into the popular imaginary. Unfortunately, the series chose to ride on this generic innovation rather than develop and expand on the relationships among these three women. Nevertheless, like An Unmarried Woman , this series depicts the struggle to adapt to new family formations and to find skills and competence where previously one had felt the ancillary half of a traditional couple. Even the title suggests a sort of easygoing, teamwork approach to single parenthood. But, like its AA counterpart from which the title is drawn, "One Day at a Time" lacked depth, originality, and the rough and contradictory edges that made sitcoms like "Maude" so interesting and entertaining.

37. The way this posing of the issue for young women continues in the popular discourse of the 1980s can be evidenced by the titles of a number of popular best-selling books of recent years: The Cinderella Complex; Women Who Love Too Much; Perfect Women; Smart Women, Foolish Choices. break

1. E. Ann Kaplan, "Mothering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal Melodrama and the Women's Film 1910-1940," in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 120.

2. Serafina Bathrick, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Women at Home and at Work," in Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi, eds., MTM: Quality Television (London: British Film Institute, 1984), 111-112.

3. There is a pseudofeminist version of this sort of gratuitous "mother bashing" to be found in Nancy Friday's My Mother/My Self (New York: Dell Publishing, 1977). Because Friday has been roundly—and rightly—criticized by numerous feminist scholars, I will avoid any discussion of her book here. Suffice it to say that Friday blames mothers for just about everything, but particularly focuses on them as malicious and repressed impediments to their daughters' adult (hetero)sexuality. This tirade would be laughable were it not so popular; sadly, it is the most widely read book on mothers and daughters, a fact that should attest to the deep and lasting resonance of mother-blame.

4. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 10th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 226.

5. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs , vol. 1, no. 1 (1975), 17.

6. J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967); Robert Briffault, The Mothers (New York: Johnson Reprint, 1969).

7. Rich, Of Woman Born, 243.

8. Judith Arcana, Our Mothers' Daughters (Berkeley: Shameless Hussy Press, 1979), 1.

9. Rich, Of Woman Born, 243.

10. Arcana, Our Mothers' Daughters, 150.

11. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, "Washing Blood," Feminist Studies, vol. 4. no. 2 (June 1978), 1-12, esp. 3.

12. Rich, Of Woman Born, 127, 220.

13. See especially Eleanor H. Kuykendall, "Toward an Ethic of Nurturance: Luce Irigaray on Mothering and Power," in Joyce Treblicot, ed., Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1983), 263-274.

14. Rich, Of Woman Born, 235.

15. Iris Marion Young, "Is Male Gender Identity the Cause of Male Domination?" in Treblicot, Mothering, 129-146, esp. 130. break

16. Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

17. Jane Flax, ''Mother-Daughter Relationships: Psychodynamics, Politics, and Philosophy," in Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, eds., The Future of Difference (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 20-40, esp. 26, 18, 37.

18. Jane Flax, "The Conflict Between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relationships and Within Feminism," Feminist Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (June 1978), 171-189, esp. 175.

19. Kim Chernin, The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity (London: Virago, 1986), 43, 54.

20. Flax, "Mother-Daughter Relationships," 37.

21. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 7.

22. Ibid., 8, 78.

23. Susie Orbach, "From Mother to Daughter," New Statesman, March 29, 1985, 28.

24. Benjamin, 78-79.

25. Ibid., 121, 99.

26. Chernin, The Hungry Self, 42-45.

27. Carol Dyhouse, "Mothers and Daughters in the Middle-Class Home, c. 1870-1914," in Jane Lewis, ed., Labour and Love: Women's Experience of Home and Family 1850-1940 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 44.

28. Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 89-90.

29. Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

30. Jane Flax, "The Conflict Between Nurturance and Autonomy," 180.

1. See especially Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner, eds., The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), and Mickey Pearlman, ed., Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

2. Several films, such as Michele Citron's Daughter Rite and the British film Bred and Born, as well as plays and photography books and exhibits, have focused on the mother/daughter relationship. Unfortunately, I could not include them in this book. break

3. Mickey Pearlman, "Introduction," in Pearlman, Mother Puzzles, 7, 8.

4. Kim Chernin, In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 12.

5. Ibid., 263.

6. Judith Kegan Gardiner, "A Wake for Mother: The Maternal Deathbed in Women's Fiction," Feminist Studies, vol. 4 (June 1978), 146.

7. Chernin, In My Mother's House, 122.

8. Mary Helen Washington, "Alice Walker: Her Mother's Gifts," Ms. , June 1982, 38.

9. Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

10. Ibid., 6.

11. Ibid., 9.

12. Robin Morgan, Dry Your Smile (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987), 50, 22.

13. Indeed, she even reprises an earlier scene: her own birth through her mother's eyes.

14. Ibid., 20.

15. Madonna M. Miner, "Guaranteed To Please: Twentieth-Century American Women's Bestsellers," in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweikart, eds., Gender and Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 191.

16. Carol Boyce Davies, "Mothering and Healing in Recent Black Women's Fiction," Sage, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring 1985), 41-43.

17. Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 94.

18. Patricia Hill Collins, "The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother/Daughter Relationships," Sage, vol. 4, no. 2 (Fall 1987), 7.

19. Gloria Wade-Gayles, "The Truths of Our Mothers' Lives: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Black Women's Fiction," Sage, vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 1984), 8.

20. Alice Walker, "Everyday Use," in In Love and Trouble (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), pp. 47, 48.

21. Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1983), 86, 87.

22. Ibid., 87-88.

23. Alice Walker, Meridian (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 92-93.

24. Ibid., 17. break

25. Ibid., 39, 40.

26. Ibid., 41.

27. Ibid., 122.

28. Ibid., 123.

29. Ibid., 120-121.

30. Wade-Gayles, "The Truths of Our Mothers' Lives," 10.

31. "Telling Our Story," An interview with Toni Morrison, Spare Rib (1988), 12-16.

32. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (New York: Putnam's, 1989), 183-184.

33. Ibid., 48.

34. Ibid., 67.

35. Ibid., 254.

36. Ibid., 255.

37. Wade-Gayles, "The Truths of Our Mothers' Lives," 11-12.

1. While watching the 1989 "Mother/Daughter International Contest," I participated in the game they play with the audience: matching up the mothers with the daughters. I was right on all three match-ups and then went on to pick all eight of the semifinalists, thus unambiguously confirming my acumen as a social researcher.

2. Paula Caplan, Don't Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

3. Madeline Pober, "Mothers and Daughters—The Eternal Love-Hate Relationship," Cosmopolitan, July 1983, 199, 245.

4. Jean Marzollo, "Are You Still Trying To Please Your Mother?" Mademoiselle, May 1983, 224.

5. Grace Baruch, Rosalind Barnett, and Caryl Rivers, "How Women and Their Mothers Become Friends," McCall's, April 1980, 32.

6. Ibid.

7. Evelyn Bassoff, Mothers and Daughters: Loving and Letting Go (New York: NAL Books, 1988), xi, 2.

8. Pober, "Mothers and Daughters," 200.

9. Bassoff, Mothers and Daughters, 215, 21.

10. Chase's language here is interesting in its similarity to that of the doctor in Now, Voyager condemning the mother for ruining Charlotte. Development as botany seems to transcend historical differences: "The only way you can continue to have a relationship with your daughter that is perennially flowering is to let her go, to help her separate her image from yours, and to see yourself as a separate being. Then a real friendship continue

can blossom." Janet Chase, "What Mothers and Daughters Can Give Each Other," Woman's Day , July 14, 1981, 55, 54.

11. Ann Grizzle, with William Proctor, Mother Love, Mother Hate: Breaking Dependent Love Patterns in Family Relationships (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988), 4, 7-8, 219.

12. Victoria Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends (New York: Delacorte Press, 1990), 310.

13. Theodore Rubin, "Psychiatrist's Notebook: Mothers and Daughters Who Can't Get Along," Ladies Home Journal , February 1981, 54.

14. Cynthia Wolfson, "Getting Mad at Mom and Living Happily Ever After," Glamour , May 1986, 54.

15. Mary McHugh, "Daughters and Mothers: Making Peace, Making Friends," Cosmopolitan , October 1984, 271, 272.

16. Colette Dowling, Perfect Women: Hidden Fears of Inadequacy and the Drive to Perform (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 36.

17. Elizabeth Tener, "You and Your Problem Mother," Cosmopolitan , June 1981, 228.

18. Barbara Creaturo, "Making Friends with Mom," Woman's Day , May 21, 1985, 24+.

19. Annie Gottlieb, "Your Mother, Your First Love," Mademoiselle , February 1982, 131, 133.

20. Aimee Ball, "The Secret Life of Mothers and Daughters," Mademoiselle , January 1985, 139.

21. Victoria Secunda, "Should You Divorce Your Mother?" New Woman , November 1988, 57-58.

22. Creaturo, "Making Friends with Mom," 24.

23. Ella Taylor, Prime Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 159.

24. A maudlin film version of this theme can be found in Nuts , starring Barbra Streisand as Claudia, a prostitute brought to court on murder charges. As she tries to prove her sanity and stand trial, the origin of Claudia's "deviation" is revealed: she survived years of incest by her rich and putatively loving stepfather. But, true to form, the mother's inability/refusal to protect her daughter is what really gets raked over. The film ends with the daughter telling her devastated mother, "I still love you," while the mother weeps, "I'm so ashamed." The stepfather's crimes seem to slip by the wayside in favor of this ''primal" narrative.

25. Secunda, When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends , xxii; Secunda, "Should You Divorce Your Mother?" 58-60.

26. Dowling, Perfect Women , 18.

27. Ellen Seiter, "Feminism and Ideology: The Terms of Women's Stereotypes," Feminist Review , vol. 22 (February 1986), 70. break

28. Dowling, Perfect Women , 18.

29. Bette, of course, had the last word. In her own biography ( This 'N That ), she replied with typical Davis sarcasm and wit to her daughter's attacks. She ends her biography with a letter to her daughter, just as her daughter had ended her account with a letter to her mother. Davis claims a confusion was made between real life and the screen ("Many of the scenes in your book I have played on the screen. It could be that you have confused the "me" on the screen with the "me" who is your mother.") and ends her letter with a caustic "p.s": "I hope someday I will understand the title My Mother's Keeper . If it refers to money, if my memory serves me right, I've been your keeper all these many years. I am continuing to do so, as my name has made your book about me a success.'' Bette Davis with Michael Herskowitz, This 'N That (New York: Putnam's, 1987), 197-198.

30. As she sits by her daughter's bedside, the mother repeats, almost verbatim, the story of the daughter's birth that Charlotte had earlier told to her sister. This repetition produces a causal effect between the daughter's overly responsible behavior, the mother's overly irresponsible behavior, and Katie's fatal accident.

31. Terri Apter, Altered Loves: Mothers and Daughters During Adolescence (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 59.

32. Emily Hancock, The Girl Within: Recapture the Childhood Self, the Key to Female Identity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989), 147.

33. Caplan, Don't Blame Mother , 3.

34. Adrienne Popper, "Mothers and Daughters," Parents' Magazine , April 1982, 57.

1. Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987), 352.

2. Ynestra King, talk at Columbia Seminar on Women and Society, Spring 1983, quoted in Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 38-39.

3. Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Knopf, 1981), 281. break