Between Women and Generations
Legacies of Dignity
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
Before Drucilla Cornell's mother died, she asked her daughter to write a book, "that would bear witness to the dignity of her death" and that "her bridge class would be able to understand." Shortly thereafter, Cornell's mother, who had degenerative disease, decided to claim her right to die. Forceful, honest, and unsentimental, this is the book that Cornell promised to write. The fundamental argument of Between Women and Generations is that all women have dignity: we must ensure that they have the conditions under which they can claim that dignity in their own lives; even if they are physically harmed or morally wronged, their dignity cannot be lost. Cornell uses the personal as a springboard to discuss contemporary issues concerning women today. She engages with the difficult nature of intergenerational relationships between women by writing about her relationship to her own mother. In telling the story of her adoption of Sarita Graciela Kellow Cornell, her Paraguayan daughter, and of her relationship with UNITY, a cooperative of house cleaners in Long island, New York, Cornelll creates a powerful picture of the legacies of dignity between women and generations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cornell, a playwright and Rutgers University political science professor, made a deathbed promise to her mother to write a book that "would bear witness to the dignity of her death and that her bridge class would be able to understand." Cornell's premise in this self-righteous, repetitive and sometimes incoherent treatise, is that "white Anglo feminists" need to respect the dignity of mothers, grandmothers, daughters and the women who work for "us" (thereby assuming, it seems, that her readers are "white Anglo feminists"). Respect allows other women to develop their "imaginary domain" so they can dream and become who they "seek to be." After some musings on her grandmother's career, Cornell detours into feminist psychoanalytic theory, reworking Spivak, Gurewich and Butler's various interventions in feminist and Lacanian debates. Fond of the sport of renaming everything, Cornell replaces "care" with "ethical and affective attunement," "gender" with "the feminine within the imaginary domain" and "dignity" with "the law of psychic separation." After pages of postmodern bravado, Cornell's narrative returns to her adoption of a six-month-old Paraguayan girl. The need for a nanny in New York City raised Cornell's awareness of the underworld of undocumented Latinas, so she interviewed some women from a housecleaners' co-op for the last section of her book. While priding herself on having learned "to listen," Cornell can't resist upstaging her interviewees by offering more dramatic moments from her own working life or by explaining to them how racism works. Cornell's academic friends may be impressed with her effort, but the bridge club will have its doubts. Photos.
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