4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good but unfocused, July 11, 2009
This review is from: Old World Daughter, New World Mother: An Education in Love and Freedom (Hardcover)
At first I had trouble figuring out what this book was about. The title suggested a memoir about a mother-daughter relationship. The first part of the book describes Laurino' Italian upbringing and her relatives. She's the daughter. The second part of the book shows Laurino as a mom. However, it's not a memoir. Laurino doesn't recount events of her life in linear fashion. She includes opinions and interviews relating to feminism.
The theme of Laurino's book seems to relate to the contradictions of the promise of feminism. For instance, Jeane Kirkpatrick - Laurino's college mentor - becomes a UN Ambassador in the Reagan administration. Though she's the first female to hold an international position in the president's cabinet, Kirkpatrick was not recognized as a feminist.
Laurino defends the speech New York Times writer Joyce Purnick made at the Barnard College commencement. Purnick acknowledged that she could not have achieved her successes if she had a child. According to Laurino, the Barnard women were furious.
Laurino points out that Purnick was telling the truth, but she goes on to blame the United States failure to accommodate female biology. Other countries, she points out, give new mothers considerably more time off.
She describes a particularly horrific experience, involving women doctors and a midwife. When she started crying after being advised to have no more children, the female doctor directs her to, "Emote later."
"Emote later?" Laurino asks. "For this I had chosen a feminist practice and its band of caring midwives?" I don't understand why Laurino didn't write a complaint to the head of her managed care group, the hospital board and, if necessary, the state medical boards. If more people would speak up, these things would happen less often.
Laurino has been active in government. Mayor Dinkins officiated at her wedding. So perhaps it's natural for her to argue for legislation to address these challenges. On the other hand, not all women (or all feminists) are married with children.
On pages 211-212, Laurino describes another woman making another unfortunate speech, also at Barnard (which happens to be my own alma mater. This woman, an unnamed dancer, says she was advised to get a husband so she could have health insurance. Laurino says the audience was furious, but says dependency can be justified. Would it be better for this woman to work at a job she detests (because dancers don't earn much money instead of accepting support from a husband?
But here's where Laurino falters. It's not about dependency: it's about the opportunity to achieve and be single. After all, a man who wanted to take a series of low-level jobs would face the same problem: get married or take a part-time job to get insurance.
Ultimately I would have liked to see a more direct focus: more direct discussion of the ironies of contemporary women's experience and more specific episodes like the health care story. The old vs new world contrast wasn't especially strong and ultimately was less interesting than some of the other issues Laurino raises.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Where have all the feminist gone?, July 31, 2009
This review is from: Old World Daughter, New World Mother: An Education in Love and Freedom (Hardcover)
Old World Daughter, New World Mother: an Education in Love and Freedom by Maria Laurino. New York. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008.
Old World Daughter, New World Mother is a provocative meditation on feminism: a symphony of intellectual, historical, economic, political, social, emotional, and personal aspects playing their part in a final creation that holds together not only the story of Maria Laurino, but also other ambitious second generation immigrant women--perhaps Italian Americans in particular, but certainly not limited to that ethnic group.
Laurino, author of the best selling book, Were You Always an Italian, grew up in a traditional household that honored women who cared for their families, who sacrificed individual dreams for the well-being of the group. Her father, breaking the mold so many ethnic fathers broke in the 70s, encouraged his daughter to establish an independent life and a career. So off she went.
At Georgetown University, Laurino `assumed the identity of a girl reporter,' found a championing mentor--Jeane Kirkpatrick, ardent anticommunist and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, nonetheless--and began looking for answers to what became, for her, a lifelong question: female autonomy. Is it possible? Can autonomy create parity in a society built on competition and profit? Do women really want autonomy?
At this point in the book, Laurino pulls out her powerful writing skills and begins, like the master she is, to twirl, cut, expose, and cite literature as well as scientific reports that lead along the path to answering her question. At the same time, readers ascend the steps of her impressive journalistic career.
As she moves from the mice-infested, exciting and sexually polarized Village Voice office to New York City Mayor David Dinkin's money-laden digs, we hear from Chaucer's Wife of Bath, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, phallocentric challenged French feminists, and young NYU students who can't define feminism. We learn about philosopher Eva Feder Kittay's concept that `everyone is some mother's child,' statistics from Australia's daycare system, a summary of British psychoanalyst's John Bowlbey's attachment theory, and the author's own Uncle Patsy who says `ev-ah-ree-tings-ah-boolsheet.'
Motherhood culminates the discussion of autonomy and equality. "The most enduring and difficult conflict for all women who want to combine motherhood with personal ambition has less to do with defined maternal roles than the absolute dependency of an infant," she writes.
To foster true feminist equality and autonomy, Laurino urges a defined chlid-caring partnership between parents, as well as for government to spend more on child care than on prisons, and that women's autonomy concerns gain top billing in political discussions.
As a mother, she can't help wondering if her fingers were stained by the grapes in her Old World? Genetic and ancestral patterns `hover about us throughout or lives.' Can family life possibly be a `joy-filled reality of attachment and dependency' and not a purposeful oppression of individual freedom?
The book surprised me. The cover and title promised a story about mothers and daughters, different, for sure, than what was delivered. As much as mothers and daughters, Laurino's meditation honed in on daughters and `feminist' fathers, sisters and successful brothers, the political dynamics of female and male co-workers, and the responsibility of wives and husbands.
Either way, as we read Laurino's book we ponder: who are we, where did we come from, where are we going? Like many Italian Americans of her generation, Laurino has done well in the New World; her heart, however, hovers in a More-Perfect World and her mind reaches out for the irretrievable Old World; the Old World of our common childhood, of our ancestors, of memory, of our sometimes ethnic self-consciousness, of our dependency on each other.
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