FOR many late twentieth-century feminist writers, the mother-daughter relationship has symbolized not a source of support and comfort, but a morass of bitterness and resentment. As Nikki Stiller has observed, during the late 1960s and throughout the following decade “it was rather bad form for a woman to mention her mother favorably in public. Alienation and hostility were held to be the hallmarks of adulthood among many who considered themselves psychologically, emotionally, and sexually liberated.”¹ Indeed, contemporary feminist discussions of the mother-daughter relationship have often stressed the negative aspects of the bond between mothers and their female offspring, emphasizing its...

IN 1917 a contributor to the popular women’s magazine,Good Housekeeping, made the following assertion:

In the lifetime of girls even twenty years old, the tradition of what girls should be and do in the world has changed as much as heretofore in a century. It used to be that girls looked forward with confidence to domestic life as their destiny. That is still the destiny of most of them, but it is a destiny that in this generation seems to be modified for all, and avoided by very many. …

The mothers of these modern girls are very much...

WHEN Sylvia Marshall’s grand tour of Europe is cut short by the news of the death of her mother in Dorothy Canfield Fisher’sThe Bent Twig, the young woman is overcome by grief: “How could her mother be dead? What did it mean to have her mother dead? … She said the grim words over and over, the sound of them was horrifying to her, but in her heart she did not believe them. Her mother,hermother could not die!”¹ As she explains to her aunt’s stepson, her mother’s death severs a bond that has been crucial in shaping...

FOR Edna Ormsby, the birth of a daughter on December 20, 1891, represented an auspicious occasion. “She is perfect in every way and promises to be a bright child for which we feel that we can not be thankful enough to the Good Father,” Mrs. Ormsby wrote in her diary. “I hope and pray that she may live to be a noble godfearing woman and a ‘woman’s woman.’ If she might be permitted to do some great service for the uplifting of her sisters I shall feel that I have not lived in vain,” she continued. “If she might only...

WHEN Louise Marion Bosworth entered Wellesley College in 1902, she joined the ranks of the small, but significant, vanguard of middle-class young women who attended college between 1880 and 1920. These “new women” constituted a group whose untraditional behavior clearly and conclusively refuted conventional standards and expectations for daughters—a group whose activities seemed particularly likely to generate major mother-daughter conflict of the sort that elicited so much attention in the contemporary periodical and advice literature. It would not have been surprising to find that the mothers of these young women objected to the new path their offspring proposed to...

AS Lucy Wilson Peters embarked on married life on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1890, she linked her own life with that of her mother in a new and adult way: she now shared her mother’s wedding anniversary, and that of her maternal grandmother and an aunt as well.¹ Lucy’s selection of this particular day for her wedding implicitly affirmed the importance she placed on maintaining close ties with her mother and her past as she entered a new phase of adulthood. Her recollections offer no hint about the ease or difficulty with which she adjusted to marriage, but her marriage...

THE preponderance of strong, mutually supportive American mother-daughter interactions between 1880 and 1920 seems especially striking in light of the conspicuously different patterns revealed by an investigation of middle-class English mother-daughter relationships during the same period. Because the lives of women in both societies were altered significantly as a result of similar social and cultural changes that marked these four decades, a comparative examination can enhance the development of a comprehensive historical understanding of American mother-daughter relationships. Despite the potential contributions of such an approach, relatively few cross-cultural comparisons are attempted by social historians. For example, while the use of...

ALTHOUGH middle-class American mother-daughter relationships never replicated the English patterns exhibited in the era of the “new woman,” there is some evidence of change during the decades following 1920. While in many ways, the interactions of twentieth-century mothers and daughters resembled those of previous generations of American women, the intensity of the intimacy that had characterized earlier relationships apparently lessened. A complete examination of the dynamics of the relationship in the post-1920 period remains beyond the limits of the present investigation, but the effort to develop the outlines of a historical framework for the analysis of the interactions of middle-class...

THE task of analyzing the nature of interpersonal relationships in the past poses a formidable challenge for the historian who must carefully peruse a range of personal, social, and cultural documents in search of that which is not said as well as that which is clearly articulated. Historically as well as in the contemporary era, the mother-daughter relationship has been characterized by an intricate mix of social and personal expectations that have rendered it exceedingly complex. In a sense, the historical examination of mother-daughter interactions raises more questions than it answers, since it is impossible to fully explain the precise...