We Are Our Mothers' Daughters: Revised Edition

by Cokie Roberts Narrated by Cokie Roberts

Overview

“[A] paean to feminism and the solidarity of womenkind. . . . This book is a celebration of women in their various roles: mother, sister, civil rights advocate, consumer advocate, first-class mechanic, politician-which Roberts' own mother once was.”
-Washington Post

“The perfect combination of powerful feelings and a modulated style.”
- Los Angeles Times

From the much beloved Cokie Roberts comes a revised and expanded tenth-anniversary paperback edition of the #1 New York Times Bestseller We Are Our Mothers' Daughters-complete with new profiles.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2019 - AudioFile

Broadcaster and political commentator Cokie Roberts narrates this revised and expanded edition of her bestselling essay collection with grace, perfect timing, and an expert knowledge of how to tell a story. The essays are an engaging mix of the personal and reportage, all focused on how women work together to build the political, cultural, and social world we know. They’re always illuminating and entertaining, and often full of a zest-filled brio that typifies her on-air personality. Depending on the topic—coping with her sister’s untimely death, her first job, the fight for women’s equality in sports and in the boardroom—the pieces will also induce tears, provoke laughter, or rouse you to righteous fury. Whatever the topic, spending quality time with Cokie Roberts is a treat. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Washington Post

This book is a celebration of women in their various roles: mother, sister, civil rights advocate, consumer advocate, first-classmechanic, politician . . . . [It is a] paean to feminism and the solidarity of womankind.

USA Today

Packed with intelligent, energetic women.

Library Journal

For the cohost of television's 'This Week' (ABC-News), we are not just 'our mothers' daughters' but the daughters of all those women who came before us, who sustained, inspired, and taught us. Showing how women are connected 'throughout time and regardless of place,' Roberts interweaves personal vignettes, an overlay of the history of the women's vote and the women's movement, and brief individual histories of women who represent the 'many roles women play.' Many of these women are connected with government, since Roberts is the daughter of former U.S. Representatives Hale Boggs (deceased) and Lindy Boggs (both D-LA), but there is also Eva Oliver, a former welfare mother, and numerous other unsung women.

Simply but feelingly written, this could be recommended to just-turned-teenagers as well as adults, though the latter may be surprised at the somewhat ingenuous tone from a seasoned reporter. -- Francine Fialkoff

School Library Journal

Roberts, an NPR and ABC correspondent, has written a series of wide-ranging essays that are delightful to read, if difficult to classify. She gently leads readers from her sister's untimely death from cancer, through her early married years as an unquestioning follower of her husband's career, to historical vignettes featuring women as warriors, fighters for human rights, or entrepreneurs. In each of these selections, the author's voice is honest, and sometimes bewildered, as she attempts to fix upon what it is that women do and what it is they should be passing on to the next generation. Roberts discusses her grandmothers and eccentric aunts as well as her own daughter and her friends. She comments that her mother and mother-in-law were both under 50 when they became grandmothers, giving that relationship a long time to grow and change. Today's young women, waiting later to marry and have children, may miss this lively connection. These and other observations are indeed food for thought, and reading this slim volume gives mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, friends, and other female relations much to think about. Many of the historical tidbits may tempt YAs to look further into the brief list of suggested readings. This is a fine vehicle for discussion or individual contemplation, giving both mothers and daughters new perspectives for viewing one another. Wonderful material for all ages.-Susan H. Woodcock, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA

Booknews

Essays describe personal experiences, women's roles, and some of the fascinating people met in the course of Roberts' career. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Dorothy Rompalske

....[A] welcome addition to some of the most important political and personal discussions about the "place of women" in American society that are occurring today.
— Biography

Kirkus Reviews

Sound bites rather than substance from a reporter known for her insightful political analyses on National Public Radio and ABC-TV. NPR fans know veteran journalist Roberts as one- third of the female triumvirate (Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer complete the triangle) that has long ruled public-radio airwaves, breaking stories and delving deeply into substantive issues. Roberts claims to want to do the same here. As a woman in her mid-50s, she has lived through many of the changes created by the women's movement. This book is meant to offer perspective on the ways that women's lives have changed so radically by telling stories about the roles women play.

Unfortunately, the analysis is as slim as the book itself. Roberts sets her rather general tone by dividing the book into the generic roles women may play, beginning with sister and moving through politician—her mother was noted Congresswoman Lindy Boggs—mechanic first class, friend, wife, and mother/daughter, among others. Some stories are historical or biographical in nature, such as the chapter that examines the life of consumer advocate Esther Peterson. Others are more personal in nature, such as Roberts' musings on her sister, Barbara, who died not long ago after a bout with cancer. None are particularly pithy. In the section on the trials of juggling a career with her reporter husband, Steven, for instance, Roberts glosses over huge issues, such as finding day care or babysitting help in an era where few women worked outside the home. 'We've had many a `heated discussion,' as the politicians say, over the appropriate allocation of each other's time between work and family,' she writes in the chapter called 'Wife.'This is the historical reference for today's working mothers?

OCTOBER 2019 - AudioFile

Broadcaster and political commentator Cokie Roberts narrates this revised and expanded edition of her bestselling essay collection with grace, perfect timing, and an expert knowledge of how to tell a story. The essays are an engaging mix of the personal and reportage, all focused on how women work together to build the political, cultural, and social world we know. They’re always illuminating and entertaining, and often full of a zest-filled brio that typifies her on-air personality. Depending on the topic—coping with her sister’s untimely death, her first job, the fight for women’s equality in sports and in the boardroom—the pieces will also induce tears, provoke laughter, or rouse you to righteous fury. Whatever the topic, spending quality time with Cokie Roberts is a treat. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173815507
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/07/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

A Woman's Place

 

A woman's place is in the house... And in the senate," the T-shirts and buttons proclaim at women's political events. "A Woman's Place Is in Uniform," trumpets a book about women in the military. "A woman's place is at the typewriter," declared Fortune magazine back in 1935. That was convenient for the economy and so it was decreed. A few years later a woman's place was in the factory or in the nursing corps because that was essential for the war effort. Then a woman's place was in the home. And now? A woman's place is anywhere she wants it to be. Fine, but who's taking care of the children? That's the question that keeps us roiled up over this issue.

 

Recently the country got all in a snit over the case of ababy apparently killed by his baby-sitter in Boston. Were people demanding the head of the baby-sitter? No, quite the contrary, it was the mother who came in for abuse by the radio callers and the editorial writers. She went to work three days a week, corning home at lunchtime to breast-feed, even though her husband had a perfectly good job. What kind of mother was she? Obviously, a selfish, greedy one who was willing to leave her children in the care of an inexperienced young woman. Wait a minute. Suppose she had gone out at night with her husband and left the babies with a teenager? What then? And didn't society just direct thousands of mothers to leave their children inanother's care by requiring that we welfare mothers go to work? Could we make up our minds here, please?

 

No, probably not, because we're still confused about this issue of a woman's place. We're confused because we know that no matter what else a woman is doing, she's also care taking and we worry that a woman "out at work" might leave someone, especially her children, without care. That's what's at the heart of this sometimes vicious debate. Sure, a lot of other, much less noble, attitudes also underlie these arguments. Plenty of people still think that women are just plain uppity and they see a woman's place as someplace to put her. But I think it's the question of the children, and now old people as well, that truly troubles us. And women with children often find whatever choice they make uncomfortable.

 

That wasn't always true. For most of human history menand women worked together in the same place and each one's work complemented the other's. No one thought the farmer's job was more important than the farm wife's. Neither could manage without the other. Teenage relatives often moved in to help care for the children, to protect them from household hazards like open fires while the busy mother made the soap and the candles, spun the cloth, pieced together the clothes, fixed the food. Women gathered together to help with large chores, and visited as they worked. They also congregated to attend to births and deaths, taking comfort from each other's company.Whenever I think of the courage it took to leave everything and everyone behind to come to this continent in the early years of colonization, I am struck by the fortitude of those settlers. First the trip across the ocean, then in later generations the trek across the continent, required women to "do it all." The history of the movement west is one of extraordinary men and women overcoming incredible odds together. It was the industrial revolution that changed everything. Men went out to work for wages, and they were paid for the hours they put in, not the tasks they completed. (Poor women went into the factories, or to domestic work, as well. In 1850 women comprised 13 percent of the paid labor force; this question of women's work is one directly related to economic class.) Suddenly, what women did at home lost its value because there was no paycheck attached. Repetitive housework replaced home manufacture as women's crafts moved into assembly-line production. And that's what we've been struggling with ever since. Doing work that is economically rewarded and socially recognized means leaving home. That could change with the information revolution, as machines make it possible to work just about anywhere. But I think it's unlikely to alter the fact that women aren't paid for their jobs as nurturers, and it still leaves women at home isolated from other women.

We Are Our Mothers' Daughters. Copyright © by Cokie Roberts. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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