Our Mothers' Daughters

Plot

Judith Arcana. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 225-233.

In the 1970’s, I was one of many women inventing and teaching Women’s Studies. In every class, no matter what the subject was, we inevitably talked about our relationships with our mothers, about the pain and confusion surrounding those relationships. When the students and I went looking for information and insight, we found very little, and very little of what we found was useful. Misogyny and mother-blaming were omnipresent, and Freud’s ignorance about women loomed large. This book grew out of my search as a scholar and my life as a daughter. It was one of the first feminist analyses of this crucial relationship, and it rose directly out of the intense struggle for women’s liberation in the second half of the 20th century in the USA.