Mothering modes: analyzing mother roles in novels by twentieth-century United States women writers

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in Chapter 4; however, the mother’s reasons differ greatly. Katie 
Nolan sees her daughter as an extension of her strong being, and she nurtures her less because of 
this belief. She dotes on the son, because she believes his ego needs strengthening. Chodorow, 
Hirsch, and Patricia Hill Collins analyze the negative aspects of mothering in their bodies of 
work, one being the fact that some mothers sacrifice nurturance in order to instill endurance in 

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their daughters. This is an area of great concern when I discuss Silla in Brown Girl, 
Brownstones and Katie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Both mothers’ strong dispositions 
contribute to the battle of wills between their daughters and themselves. Consequently, that stern 
disposition is created by a hard, ambitious life and the constant struggle to deal with an 
incompatible husband. 
This discussion of women’s second-class citizenship is also central to Jean Baker Miller's 
groundbreaking 1976 work, Toward a New Psychology of Women. According to Miller, there 
are two major types of subordination or inequality: temporary and permanent. Temporary 
Inequality involves the adult as dominant and the child as subordinate, and Permanent Inequality 
involves the white, middle-class male as dominant and those categorized as different by birth 
(i.e., sex, race, ethnicity, class, etc.) as subordinate (3-12). For women, this hierarchy of 
inequality is more than just two-fold. Their lifelong struggle as subordinate within Permanent 
Inequality taints their role within the Temporary Inequality of adult and child. It is in this area of 
Permanent Inequality that women learn and internalize sex inferiority, and that ethnic women 
learn and internalize inferiority due to race and nationality as well. Women who internalize 
subordination within Permanent Inequality will often then act as dominants within Temporary 
Inequality, and there is no more common form than maternity. It is within this realm of 
Temporary Inequality, the adult/child dichotomy, that "the superior person is supposed to engage 
with the lesser in such a way as to bring the lesser member up to full parity; that is, the child is to 
be helped to become the adult" (Miller 4). In the mother-daughter relationship, this task is 
extremely difficult since, within Permanent Inequality, women can never reach full parity. In 
opposition to this premise, Debold, Wilson, and Malavé write: “The fierce connection that a 
daughter feels for her mother is reciprocated by a mother’s fierce love for her child. The power 

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balances here can sometimes offset the power difference felt as inequality” (Debold 42). The 
same can be true for both mother and daughter as they attempt to offset the state of Permanent 
Inequality.
In many of the mothering examples in this study, the mothers’ coping strategies aid them 
in turning Miller’s analysis upside-down. In this case, the power that women do have changes 
the whole picture for the mother-daughter relationship, whether in the form of the mother’s 
summoning of inner strength, the example of another strong woman, or the presence of a 
women-centered network. The universality of Miller’s analysis is also challenged by feminists of 
color with whom I agree, such as Gloria I. Joseph, who take the stance that many daughters of 
poor and minority mothers respect their mothers’ strength and survival skills in the face of 
oppressive circumstances. This is exhibited in both novels in Chapter 4, in spite of the daughters’ 
objections to the manner in which their mothers are rearing them. The conflict here concerning 
the differences in mothering for women of color is also largely reflected in both political and 
literary feminist ideas.