It's A Girl: Women Writers On Raising Daughters

Today I am a reviewer for the Blog Book Tour for It's A Girl: Women Writers On Raising Daughters. This book, edited by Andrea J. Buchanan, contains thirty wonderful essays in which women writers explore a variety of issues that they have faced in raising, or preparing to raise, their daughters. The essays are interesting, well-written and often enlightening; I would highly recommend this book to both women and men who are raising daughters, as well as to anyone interested in good writing about the parenting experience in general.

An overarching theme of this book is that, while raising sons is sometimes experienced as an adventure into the realm of "Other" for mothers, raising daughters is often about dealing with issues of "Self". Some of the the essays explored the ways in which mothers looked forward to sharing with daughters things that they had enjoyed or wished they had been able to enjoy...only to find that their daughters had their own ideas about what was enjoyable and were not, in fact, reflections of their mothers' desires, no matter how much it often felt, out in the world, that people judged mothers by what they saw in daughters. Some essays explored the ambivalence, and even dread, that some writers felt at the prospect of raising daughters - having intimate knowledge of what women face in our world and knowing that, in raising a daughter, they would be forced to confront all the things in their lives that they had run away from and stuffed down into the unconscious.

I enjoyed the essays in which mothers were forced to contend with the ways in which their daughters' interests sometimes irritated their feminist ideals. There were a number of essays about the pink, princessy world that so many little girls tend to fall for despite the best efforts of their egalitarian mothers and the need to eventually understand that pink, fluffy princesses can be strong, tough women, too. Miriam Peskowitz' essay, Cheerleader, was mainly about how she came to terms with her daughter's cheerleading-fantasy phase as well as her general passion for all things "girly", and came to realize that these things did not mean that her daughter was not independent and strong. What struck me the most about the essay, though, was a creepy underthread...when the boys, kindergarteners at a Quaker school, attacked a cheerleading doll with a weird violence. Raising daughters makes us remember how all of that works out, too. It makes us fear for them.

One of my favorite essays was Andrea's own, Learning to Write, in which she shares the way that her daughter's anger at her finally tipped the scales and caused her daughter to do something needed that she had been afraid to do before. How often it seems that our daughters must hurt us to grow.

Raising daughters is as complicated as they are and as we are, as well. It truly is a journey into Self...often into it and out of it and into it all over again, for the rest of our lives. It makes us face all the things we do not want to face and fight things we never thought we would be brave enough or care enough about to fight before. It's A Girl is a wonderful exploration of many facets of this journey and I highly recommend it.