Lives Together/Worlds Apart Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture [Paperback]

In the 1940s filmNow, Voyager,Bette Davis plays a daughter struggling against her mother's stifling repression. Nearly fifty years later, in the Hollywood sagaPostcards from the Edge, Shirley MacLaine, as a neglectful and bossy mother, inflicts untold psychological pain on her daughter, played by Meryl Streep. These dramas of conflict and the ambivalent struggle for separation have been central to popular images of mothers and daughters in the last half-century in the U.S. Walters boldly challenges these dichotomies and proposes an innovative and multilayered understanding of the cultural construction of the mother/daughter relationship.

In a discussion of popular media ranging from themes of maternal martyrdom to maternal malevolence, Walters shows that since World War II, mainstream culture has generally represented the mother/daughter relationship as one of never-ending conflict and thus promoted an ideology of separation as necessary to the daughter's emancipation and maturity. This ideological move is placed in a social context of the anti-woman backlash of the early post-war period and the renewed anti-feminism of the Reagan and Bush years.

Walters uses exceptions to mainstream imagery-films such asA Tree Grows in Brooklyn, television shows like Maude, novels likeThe Joy Luck Club-to offer evidence of alternative traditions and paradigms. Timely and vividly argued,Lives Together/Worlds Apartmakes a brilliant contribution to discussions of popular culture and feminism.

Suzanna Danuta Waltersis Assistant Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. She is currently completing a book on feminist cultural theory.

In these days of psychological overkill,Lives Together/Worlds Apartis a bold, transforming, and refreshing new look at mothers and daughters. Walters's sensitivity and skill in navigating the terrain of popular culture and image-making puts this pivotal³/