Word: mother
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Friday is hardly alone. Such recent books as Freeman's Who Is Sylvia? and Signe Hammer's Daughters and Mothers, Mothers and Daughters also dwell on the maternostra theme, and still more of the genre are in the offing. Even Hollywood and television are exploiting mother-daughter tensions. Woody Allen's Interiors and Ingmar Bergman's Autumn Sonata are based on such themes; CBS plans two dramatic specials, one of them starring Bette Davis, tentatively scheduled to be aired on Mother...
...common refrain in all this is a basic psychological truth: girls have far more trouble liberating themselves from Mother than boys do. At about 18 months, all children go through a deep conflict between a comforting sense of oneness with Mother and a strong drive to seek independence. For boys the crucial emancipating step is easier; they know their destiny is to be different−like Father. Says New York Child Psychologist Louise Kaplan: "The girl can't pull away without seeming to reject the model of what she will become−a woman...
Women who never truly separate from their mothers are likely to re-create the mother-daughter antagonism in adult relationships. Freeman, in her confessional book, says that she repeatedly projected her mother problems onto the men in her life: "I was still trying to earn my mother's love−any way I could." Comments Cambridge Psychoanalyst Gregory Rochlin: "Many women know they are in a struggle but not that it's displaced from Mother onto...
This position has outraged some feminists who think that the women's movement should focus on the abuses of male power rather than on what women do to each other. Says Feminist Author Judith Pildes Arcana: "The message is still the same−blame your mother, woman-negative." In her view, mother-daughter problems are really the result of the repressive roles forced on women by what she calls "patriarchial capitalism." Sociologist Pauline Bart has even accused Friday of trying to push her into a blame-Mother position during an interview for her book...
...more scholarly The Reproduction of Mothering (University of California Press; $12.95), Nancy Chodorow occupies the middle ground. A sociologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, she agrees that a male-dominated society sets up mother-daughter conflicts, but she sees them in largely sociopsychological terms. By depicting motherhood as the most valuable state for a woman, she says, men are able to leave most parenting to women. This lets mothers dominate their children's emotional lives, and, as Chodorow explains, ensures the cycle's repetition: in what she calls the psychological "reproduction" of mothering, the daughter...