Author: By Alison Bass, Globe Staff
Date: Sunday, May 14, 1995
Page: 1
Section: METRO
When Ester Shapiro left southern Florida for college in Massachusetts, she was fleeing
from her authoritarian father and her Cuban-Jewish family's restrictive notions of how
women should behave.
Above all, she was fleeing from her own mother's life.
"I thought my mother's life was a fate worse than
death," says Shapiro, 41, of Newton, who has become a family psychologist, author and
assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. "Not only did my
mother not work, but she became agoraphobic. She so overcommitted herself to a life
devoted to family that she couldn't function away from the family."
But as Shapiro made her leap into the larger world, she could
draw inspiration from other women in her family. Both of her grandmothers had left Europe
for Cuba, where they worked full time in family businesses, and Ester -- along with her
two younger sisters, who joined her in Boston a few years later -- was able to look to
their success in balancing work and family.
The story of Ester and her forebears is far from unique. Such a
pattern is common among middle-class mothers and daughters, researchers say, with each
generation rebelling anew against their closest and most powerful role models: their
mothers.
"I see this dynamic on many different levels, beginning at
the individual family level in the push-pull of emotional connection and separation
between individual mothers and daughters, and I also see it on a broader social
scale," says Anita M. Harris, a journalist and former Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
In her new book, "Broken Patterns," Harris traces this
dynamic to the Colonial era, showing how mother-daughter relations changed as the United
States evolved from a largely agricultural society to an industrialized nation.
SIDEBAR
From an early age, Rosa Hallowell knew she would not be breaking ground in her effort to
pursue a career. After all, if her Italian-American grandmother could do it -- at a time
when the social pressures on women to stay home were much fiercer -- so could she.
Her mother, Rosa Shinagel, also worked, but "in a very
motherly type of way -- she went into teaching so she could be home when we were,"
says Hallowell, 31, a corporate litigator for Gadsby and Hannah in Boston. "The role
model in my life was my grandmother."
But Hallowell's grandmother, Carmen Bonanno, was a woman who
broke the mold, rebelling against her mother as many other middle-class women did at the
turn of the century.
Carmen's mother came from an aristocratic Italian family that
immigrated to the United States, and she had no desire to work outside the home or even to
learn English.
"She would only speak Italian because she thought it was a
beautiful language," recalls Rosa Shinagel. "She stayed at home and refused to
become part of American culture."
Her daughter, Carmen, could not have been more different. She
loved working in her father's business -- a chain of grocery stores -- and refused to
learn to cook, hemstitch or "do any of the things her mother wanted," says
Shinagel, who recently retired as assistant dean of students for Radcliffe
College.
Carmen grew up in Newton and went to the Portia Law School (then
a school for women, now the coed New England School of Law). And although she was never
allowed to practice, she continued to work after her marriage -- first running a gourmet
food company started by her husband and then working as a buyer in the family-owned linen
service.
Shinagel says her mother worked into her late 70s and was
"sharp as a tack" until she died three years ago at 87. But Shinagel took a
different path, marrying young and staying home with her children during their early
years.
"In some ways, I think I was fulfilling my grandmother's
aristocratic sense of herself by marrying a Boston Brahmin," says Shinagel.
"Also, I graduated from college in 1960, and in those years, two out of three women
were engaged or married by the age of 21. So I got married at 21 too."
When Shinagel was divorced, she began working full time, but at
jobs that allowed her to be home with her children in the afternoon -- teaching at a
private school and then at Radcliffe.
While Shinagel and her daughter are close, the younger Rosa
looked to her grandmother for guidance in her vocation.
"When my daughter went to law school, she would telephone
her grandmother, who could still remember the classic law cases and discuss them with
her," Shinagel recalls.
Hallowell, who is newly married, wears her
grandmother's law school ring on one hand and her wedding band on the other. She hopes to
have children someday, she says, and she wishes her grandmother could be there to help her
face the "daunting prospect of juggling small children with what I do now."
BREAKING THE RULES
As more women left home to work in factories, Harris
and other historians note, church leaders, politicians and columnists of the day
increasingly preached the notion that a woman's "natural" role was homemaking.
As this ''cult of domesticity" spread in the mid-1800s, middle- and upper-class women
were encouraged, and in some cases forced, to stay at home and forgo paid employment.
By the turn of the century, though, the daughters of some of
these homemakers were reacting against their mothers' experience, becoming suffragists and
breaking into professions that had been dominated by men, such as law and medicine.
And many of their daughters, in turn, took entirely different
paths, becoming homemakers who spurned or gave up paid employment in the late 1940s and
'50s. The women's liberation movement of the '60s marked yet another pendulum swing.
Harris is quick to point out that these "broken
patterns," while common in white middle-class families, are not universal. They did
not exist 200 years ago, when the United States was an agricultural society. And, Harris
and others note, they are largely absent among generations of African-American women.
"African-American women have always had to work," says
Elizabeth Debold, of the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and co-author of the best
seller ''Mother-Daughter Revolution."
"The kind of disjunction you get between white middle-class
women and their daughters is simply not found among African-American women," she
says. ''It's class-driven."
Among middle-class women, Debold and others see the
pattern in largely feminist terms: Daughters, because they identify with their mothers,
are aware of the difficulties they face, whether as homemakers whose contributions are
devalued by society or as working women exhausted by the demands of family and work. As a
result, many women choose different paths from those their mothers took.
REJECTING 'SUPERWOMAN'
In interviews with more than 500 adolescent girls
through the Harvard project, Debold and her colleagues have found that many women in their
teens and 20s reject the model of mothers who try to be superwomen. Instead, they either
want to get married and stay home, she says, or they "would like to be guys,"
excelling at careers without the demands of family life.
"The girls see what the women won't admit --
the exhaustion, the pain, how complicated it is to live a double life when they are still
carrying most of the burden at home," Debold says.
"This becomes a dynamic that gets worked out
between mothers and daughters in generation after generation rather than being seen for
what it is: a society that refuses to accommodate the fact that women are deeply involved
in raising children and would also like to have a voice in the world."
Other researchers see the dynamic in more historical
terms: succeeding generations of women buffeted by societal forces such as
industrialization, economic depression or war, which alternately push women toward work
outside the home and back to a focus on homemaking.
Whatever its roots, the resulting divide between
generations is not impassable, many scholars say.
"The push-pull metaphor doesn't work in our
family, and the reason it doesn't work is because there's so much talk between my daughter
and me," says Kathy Weingarten, a family therapist and author of "The Mother's
Voice: Strengthening Family Intimacy."
The women in Weingarten's family have always worked
and been involved in civic causes, she says, and her 16-year-old daughter, an ardent
animal rights activist, seems to be headed down the same path.
"Both of my children have been involved in a
collaborative conversation with me about how my work affects them and how important
meaningful work is in our lives," Weingarten says.
"The more speaking the mother has done, and
the more the daughter has developed the capacity to listen to the mother, and be a speaker
about her own life, the more the mother and daughter can understand each other's life
experience." SIDEBAR I
FOR REBEL DAUGHTER, GENERATIONS OF ROLE MODELS
SIDEBAR II
FOR SOME, RACE AND WORK ETHIC WERE KEY
Yvonne Gittins has a little trouble understanding
the problems some of her white colleagues have with their mothers.
Gittins, an African-American assistant dean of student financial
aid at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, considers her 65-year-old mother a good
friend and has a similarly close relationship with her two grown daughters.
"I listen to some of my colleagues talking about the
problems they have relating to their mothers, and I feel grateful," says Gittins, 48,
of Cambridge. "There wasn't that pull and push in my family, and I think it's
because I knew my mom had to work."
Unlike many middle-class women over the past century, the women
in Gittins' family have always had to work. It was a matter of simple survival.
Gittins' great-grandmother -- and probably her mother before her
-- worked in the sugarcane fields on Barbados, first as slaves and then as field hands.
Gittins' grandmother came to Boston in 1908, at 15, and worked as a maid while raising
eight children.
When she retired from domestic work, Gittins recalls, her
grandmother cared for Yvonne and her brother so that Gittins' mother could work full time.
"My mother worked until the day she retired at the age of
65," Gittins recalls. "She started out in factories, and years later I finally
convinced her to get a desk job at MIT."
Gittins has always worked, too, beginning with a secretarial job
at MIT after she graduated from high school while she attended night school to earn her
degrees. She is now president of the Eastern Association of Financial Aid Administrators.
"I would have loved to have been able to stay home with my
kids until they were ready for school, but economics just wouldn't allow it," says
Gittins, whose children were cared for by her aunt.
Even so, Gittins says her experience and those of her forebears
have had a positive influence on relationships among women in her family.
"I feel very close to my daughters, and I think they take a
strong work ethic from my experience," Gittins says. "And I feel a real
closeness to my mother. She's not only my mother, she's my friend."
BASS ;05/09 CAWLEY;05/15,18:46 MOTHER14