ABSTRACT
The relationship between mothers and their daughters is among the most vexing problems for feminist theory. Irigaray’s meditation on the obstacles to women’s identity and individuality is cast in the form of an extended apostrophe, in which she confronts her mother with her frustrations, with the ways in which their relationship stifles her. A torrent of tropes—milk as ice, mothers and daughters as living mirrors, women as prisoners—this essay rages against the conflation of daughters with their mothers, against mothers’ vicarious identification with their daughters’ lives, and against women’s confinement to the single role of motherhood. Also, it pleads for a conception of womanhood that would allow both the mother and the daughter to be distinct individuals and to achieve this without abandoning their ties to one another and without necessitating a liberating bond to a man.
—D.T.M.
