Mother Daughter Revolution

For generations, women have unwittingly betrayed their daughters as they handed down self-negating skills to get along in patriarchal society. Connecting personal with political change, this book provides strategies to resist betrayal and empower our daughters, ourselves, and all women.

“Describes the potential for a powerful new relationship between mothers and daughters which would change the relationship between all women and girls.”—Gloria Steinem As the daughters of baby boomer moms approach womanhood the questions begin. Will I teach my daughter the right things? How do I correct the mistakes my mother made with me? Mother Daughter Revolution: From Betrayal to Power addresses all the issues that a mother guiding a budding woman could possibly need to know about. Authors Elizabeth Debold, Marie Wilson, and Idelisse Malave approach these dilemmas as would any other mother who is concerned with the survival of her daughter in a male-dominant society would. This book centers on women's attempts to build trusting relationships with their daughters. The foundation of this trust is based on removing the feeling of betrayal that develops when daughters feel that their mothers have not prepared them for the earthshaking changes they experience during adolescence. Lack of preparation for these changes leads to a lack of confidence and an inability to deal with competition. Mother Daughter Revolution is written in a problem and solution style and describes the path from adolescence to womanhood through identifiable stories and anecdotes. Many mothers recount stories of being told by their mothers to "be nice" because "nice girls get married and get good things." Well, these new mothers opt to tell their daughters that being nice is not always an option, especially if "being nice" infringes upon their rights.

A daughter’s “tender and unflinching portrait of her complex, privileged, wildly talented mother” (Louise Erdrich) evolves beautifully into a narrative of the far-reaching changes in women’s lives in the twentieth century. With the sweep of an epic novel, Our Revolution follows charismatic and brilliant Jenny Moore, whose life changed as she became engaged in movements for peace and social justice. Decades after Jenny’s early death, acclaimed poet and memoirist Honor Moore forges a new relationship with the seeker and truth teller she finds in her mother’s writing. Our Revolution is a daughter’s vivid, absorbing account of the mother who shaped her life as an artist and a woman, “beautifully recorded, documented, and envisioned as feminist art and American history” (Margo Jefferson).

A groundbreaking history of the American Revolution that “vividly recounts Colonial women’s struggles for independence—for their nation and, sometimes, for themselves.... [Her] lively book reclaims a vital part of our political legacy" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American. In this book, Carol Berkin shows us how women played a vital role throughout the conflict. The women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy as husbands, brothers and fathers died. Yet Berkin also reveals that it was not just the men who fought on the front lines, as in the story of Margaret Corbin, who was crippled for life when she took her husband’s place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. This incisive and comprehensive history illuminates a fascinating and unknown side of the struggle for American independence.

On the surface, Victoria Jackson is the American Dream personified: from a troubled childhood and unfinished high school education, she overcame immeasurable odds to create a cosmetics empire valued at more than half a billion dollars. Married to Bill Guthy—self-made principal of infomercial marketing giant Guthy-Renker—Victoria’s most treasured role is mother to three beautiful, beloved children, Evan, Ali, and Jackson. Suddenly, Victoria’s dream life is broken as she begins to battle a mother’s greatest fear. In 2008, her daughter, Ali, began experiencing unusual symptoms of blurred vision and an ache in her eye. Ali’s test results led to the diagnosis of Neuromyelitis Optica. NMO is is a little understood, incurable, and often fatal autoimmune disease that can cause blindness, paralysis, and life-threatening seizures, and afflicts as few as 20,000 people in the world. At the age of 14, Ali was given a terrifying prognosis of four to six years to live. Saving Each Other: A Mother Daughter Love Story begins just as Victoria and Bill learn of Ali’s disease, starting them on a powerful journey to save Ali, their only daughter, including bringing together a team of more than fifty of the world’s leading experts in autoimmune and NMO-related diseases to create the Guthy-Jackson Charitable Foundation. Told in alternating viewpoints, Victoria and Ali narrate their very different journeys of coming to terms with the lack of control that neither mother nor daughter have over NMO, and their pioneering efforts and courage to take their fight to a global level. Bringing their story to light with raw emotion, humor, warmth, and refreshing candor, Saving Each Other is the extraordinary journey of a mother and daughter who demonstrate how the power of love can transcend our greatest fears, while at the same time battling to find a cure for the incurable.

Explores the lives of colonial women, particularly during the Revolutionary War years, arguing that eighteenth-century Americans had very clear notions of appropriate behavior for females and the functions they were expected to perform, and that most women suffered from low self-esteem, believing themselves inferior to men.

My bubbe's house was filled with photos of all the children and grandchildren she would not count. The photo gallery was a mirror of the life cycle of the family ... The lost family, the family in Russia, was frozen in the moment of the only portrait we had. That photo stood by itself on a small window sill at the right corner of the dining room. To us, they were always a little girl, a little boy, and two young parents, all of them staring somberly at us. None of them were included in the count of not one, not two, of my grandmother's children and grandchildren. Why didn't my mother and her siblings talk about their lost sister in all the years of my childhood? How could my grandmother have tucked away the memory of the daughter who was her first child? How could she see that photo every day and yet never speak of Frayda? They, especially my grandmother, must have buried her deep within their hearts so that they could cope with the sorrow, the loss, and the guilt of being safe in America.

October 23, 1956 For 12 days, countless Hungarian teenagers fought in the bloody Hungarian Revolution against Communist tyranny and overwhelming Soviet armor. They set up tank barricades, tossed Molotov cocktails, and with their confiscated Russian submachine guns made a stand on the streets of Budapest, hoping to hold out until help arrived from the West. But there was no help. Nobody came to their aid. This is the story of one such brave freedom fighter-a 14 year-old girl. "For 12 days in 1956, the Hungarian people caught a fleeting glimpse of their independence. Armed with little more than a love of liberty, the impatient patriots of Hungary rose up against the mighty Soviet empire. They stormed the jails and they freed political prisoners For 12 days, there was hope, but then came the response and it was terrible and ferocious. Soviet troops and tanks rumbled into Hungary, killing tens of thousands of people and condemning thousands of others to Siberian gulags." -Condoleezza Rice U.S. Secretary of State