Motherless Daughters
Page 46
6 According to U.S. Census data, about 63,000 of these girls were living with widowed fathers. The rest lost mothers to abandonment or divorce. The 840,000 figure, however, doesn’t include girls whose widowed fathers remarried. Approximately 400,000 girls in the United States are currently living with a biological father and a stepmother, although no bureau statistic exists to tell us how many of these girls lost their mothers to death.
7 Of the 154 motherless women surveyed for this book, 28 percent were oldest daughters, 25 percent were middle children, 31 percent were the youngest, 15 percent were only children, and 1 percent were twins.
8 Because the survey asked the open-ended question, “What is your marital status?” the number of women currently married may include some second and third marriages, and the number currently single may include some women who have been divorced. An additional 3 percent of the women surveyed were widowed.
9 Some women named more than one mother substitute.
10 Not one woman chose the answer “nothing.” It seems that even a daughter who spent very little time with her mother manages to collect some information about her or identify with her experiences, and feels she knows something about her life.
11 These were women who had not tested positive for a BRCA gene. Motherless daughters who do test positive often opt for prophylactic mastectomies and reconstructive surgeries, with full support from their doctors.
12 The researchers defined resolved, a term I prefer to avoid, by the subjects’ scores on the Lack of Resolution of Mourning Scale, which is based on John Bowlby’s discussion of normal and pathological grief. Researchers also took into account a mother’s behavioral response at the time of loss, as well as her adult preoccupation with thoughts of early attachments.
13 When Charlotte wrote this story, Anne was five—the same age Charlotte was when their mother died. According to Branwen Bailey Pratt, the author of the article “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘There was once a little girl’: The Creative Process,” observing Anne at age five may have reactivated Charlotte’s emotional response to her mother’s death, which caused her to choose this topic for her story.
14 May include women cohabiting with partners
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Copyright © 2006 by Hope Edelman
Quoted material on pages 36 and 49-50 from Erna Furman’s A Child’s Parent Dies © 1974 is
“A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” from
The Poems of Dylan Thomas © 1945 by the Trustees of the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas is
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Set in 11 pt. Stempel Garamond by Cynthia Young
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Edelman, Hope.
p. cm.
“First Da Capo Press edition.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-738-21132-9
1. Deprivation (Psychology) 2. Loss (Psychology) 3. Maternal deprivation. 4. Mothers and daughters. 5. Bereavement—Psychological aspects. I. Title.
BF575.D35E34 2006
155.9’37--dc22
2005033840
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