Generations: A Century of Women Speak about Their Lives by Myriam Miedzian, Alisa Malinovich | eBook

What are the differences in how your grandmother, your mother, and your daughter experience the world? Compare the story of your grandmother’s first date with you mother’s, your mother’s volunteer work with your own career, your great-grandmother’s education and expectations with those of a teen today. The women in this landmark work of oral history are from diverse ethnic, geographic, and social backgrounds, and they tell stories about all aspects of their lives, from their professional and romantic experiences to sex discrimination and their own realized or unrealized aspirations. The result is a dynamic and captivating portrait that all women will find themselves in, and a work which will stand as one of the lasting documents of century that very well may be remembered as the Women’s Century.

In recent decades volumes have been written on women’s history and the effects the feminist movement has had on American culture. But something is missing from these accounts: how the reality and day-to-day texture of women’s lives—whether or not they ever considered themselves “feminists”—have been transformed over the course of the twentieth century. As in the best oral history, the stories these women candidly tell are vivid and often poignantly detailed. We hear accounts of rural, chore-filled childhoods at the beginning of the century, of contemporary teens without curfews, of dates that began with a chat with father in the parlor, of the sexual liberation of the 1960s, of women who worked in factories during World War II, of those who were pioneers in their professions, and of women who today struggle heroically to balance the demands of marriage or single mothering, work, and children.

Sweeping in scope, and yet rooted in the details, emotions, and dilemmas of everyday life, the journey women have traveled over the century here becomes all the more dramatic, the transformation they have undergone all the more remarkable. Generations is a celebration of this transformation in all its complexity, an embracing and vibrant family scrapbook that belongs to all American women.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Compiled by a mother-and-daughter team, this gathering of original interviews with women, spanning three generations and representing a wide array of ethnicities, classes, locations and lifestyles, constitutes a vivid oral history of contemporary women in America. The topics addressed in these firsthand accounts range from corsets and bra-burnings to WWII factory jobs, supermom heroics and practically everything else. Vast in scope and inherently overwhelming, the book nevertheless achieves its aimto "make more nuanced our understanding of the journey women have taken over the century," as Miedzian (Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence) puts it in her introduction. Malinovich is a recent graduate of Brown University. Unfortunately, the book's structure diminishes its impact. The three main sections ("Growing Up," "Family" and "Work") are divided by generation (women born from 1900 to the early 1930s, early 1930s to mid-'50s and mid-'50s to mid-'70s) and then into chapters comprised of interview segments grouped together for reasons that are unclear and with often uninspired titles, such as "It was 1960," "We Split Up" and "I Have Done a Lot of Volunteer Work." As a result, individual accounts are scattered, drastically minimizing the impact and clarity of stories from 150 women.

Library Journal

Miedzian (Boys Will Be Boys, LJ 6/1/91) and daughter Malinovich spent five years locating women willing to tell their life stories, editing the interviews, and selecting excerpts for this book. They have divided the work into three sections ("Growing Up," "Family," and "Work") and each section into three "generations": 1900 to the early 1930s, mid-1930s to the early 1950s, and mid-1950s to the present. Except for the introduction, the book consists of one- to two-page excerpts from the interviews without further commentary. Although the authors admit they did not do a scientific sampling, they have well represented a diverse group of American women single, married, divorced, gay, widowed from a variety of backgrounds. Superbly edited, the book reads as if the women were talking to you. Highly recommended for all readers.Linda L. McEwan, Elgin Community Coll., Ill.

Kirkus Reviews

Unadorned recollections of women's lives, spanning all the generations born in this century.

Miedzian (Boys Will Be Boys, not reviewed) and Malinovich, a mother-and-daughter team, interviewed dozens of women, dividing the remembrances into sections about growing up, family, and work. In their exchanges, the authors tried to span not only differences in age, but economic, religious, and cultural variations. Certainly, the differences are stark. To the women born in the early part of the century, sex was a taboo topic—young girls began menstruating without a word of warning from mothers or grandmothers, and baby brothers or sisters would appear in the home as if by magic. Among the young women born in the '60s and '70s (one of whom runs a condom shop), no topic seems to be taboo. To women born before 1920, marriage was virtually the only choice for their adult lives and they were subject to their husbands, however reluctantly, as they had been subject to their fathers. Women born after the late '60s seem to have a plethora of choices, about work, marriage, children, and sexual preference. The differences are interesting, and the similarities are striking. Women born in the early 1900s worked from dawn to long past dark, cooking, cleaning, canning, tending children, and managing a household; women born in the late part of the century also work from dawn to long past dark, juggling demanding jobs, children, and household management. Women born from the 1930s to the 1950s are the bridge generation who caught the wave of the protest movements: civil rights, Vietnam, and feminism. They, perhaps more than the others, found themselves thrown onto the sand at midlife in a different world.

Some interesting raw material here, but both the drama of the individual lives and the analysis that would lend them weight are missing.

Generations: A Century of Women Speak about Their Lives

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