The mother-daughter relationship has been explored in many disciplines, including psychology, gender studies, and sociology. Many academics have taken different theoretical angles to understand its innerworkings: not all of them favorable. For one, Adrienne Rich’s seminal book Of Woman Born (1976) and the feminist scholarship that took inspiration from this work were mostly in response to how much the mother-daughter relationship “[had] been minimized and trivialized,” while the mother-son relationship was studied extensively in a positive light.4
Studies following in the footsteps of Rich’s initial challenge to academia’s treatment of the mother-daughter relationship aimed to explore its complexity more candidly. Rich, saw this relationship as a mutually destructive one, characterized as such not due to faults of the individual, but of the patriarchy. Patriarchy made mothers prisoners to and victims of the experience of motherhood, and that victimization is carried over on to the daughter.
“A mother’s victimization does not merely humiliate her, it mutilates the daughter who watches her for clues as to what it means to be a woman… The mother’s self-hatred and low expectations are the binding rags for the psyche of the daughter.”
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (1976)
Dorothy Dinnerstein and Jane Flax also expressed concerns about the consequences of motherhood, with the latter specifically focusing on its impacts on the psyche of daughters. 5 Flax’s concern was on how the mother-daughter relationship is overly undifferentiated, with the two existing in a symbiotic co-dependence full of unresolved anger and resentment.6
Still, many thinkers do see the relationship as a more positive and beautiful one, to the point that Suzanna Daunta Walters, in Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture(1992), broadly typologized the field to either “valorize” the mother-daughter relationship “as a transcendent bond” or seen as a harmful connection that keeps women tethered to self-destruction and “patterns of submission.”7 This co-existence of such divergent theories makes the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship clear.
“Not only does the mother-daughter relationship contain multitudes, but it is also not even necessarily stagnant, adding another dimension of possible complexity.”
Additionally, more contemporary empirical perspectives from clinicians take an intermediate position, recognizing that a poor mother-daughter relationship can lead to grave implications in wellness, while also recognizing that relationships can be improved on. 8 One therapist optimistically noted increasing awareness of this potential for improvement, with more mother-daughter pairs seeking therapy for the pair.9 Thus, not only does the mother-daughter relationship contain multitudes, but it is also not even necessarily stagnant, adding another dimension of possible complexity.
The final layer of complexity lies in intersectionality. Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis wrote about race intersecting with the mother-daughter relationship.10 According to Joseph and Lewis, not only are there broad differences between black and white women’s lives, their conceptualizations of the mother-daughter relationship differ as well. Joseph and Lewis claim “that the current feminist fear of ‘becoming like your mother’ is a particularly white and middle-class phenomenon,” that cannot be generalized to black women.11
“The mother-daughter relationship is not compartmentalized from other domains of a woman’s life; its impacts, good or bad, are not insulated from the individual outside of the relationship and in society, and thus, the mother-daughter relationship may actually have impacts far beyond the two people involved.”
Why should those outside of a given mother-daughter relationship even bother considering this complex relationship? The mother-daughter relationship is not compartmentalized from other domains of a woman’s life; its impacts, good or bad, are not insulated from the individual outside of the relationship and in society, and thus, the mother-daughter relationship may have impacts far beyond those immediately involved. Many scholars have suggested similar ideas. For instance, psychologist Carl Jung claimed that “Every mother contains her daughter within herself, and every daughter her mother. . . .Every woman extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter,” implying that the relationship is consequential in fundamentally shaping the individuals themselves. 12 In Toward a New Psychology of Women(1976), Jean Baker Miller makes a similar claim that is more explicit in how the resonant influences of the mother-daughter relationship can go beyond family life, claiming that making and maintaining relationships, with their mother and more, is the decisive factor “women’s sense of self becomes . . . organized around.”13 Thus, the mother-daughter relationship impacts every woman and, indirectly, the people around them—our entire society.
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