Grandmothers : Granddaughters Remember

This book celebrates an intimate and profound link between women -- that between grandmother and granddaughter. This collection of stories and vignettes -- a multicultural anthology of women from diverse ethnic backgrounds -- reveals how the mantle of culture and family is passed from woman to woman. As they vividly explode stereotypes, the pieces illustrate not only the courage of older women, but the received wisdom of younger women. Granddaughters remember their grandmothers as extraordinary women at once defiant and tradition bound, loving and stubbornly dogmatic. Some reinvent their grandmothers, others discover them for the first time. For example, Mary Helen Washington unmasks the word "freedpeople" in her grandmother's story to reveal the widespread aggression against supposedly freed slaves. Beryl Minkle's Bubba tells a tale of cultural and religious injustice that includes the oppression of women. Noted Native American writer Paula Gurin Allen reflects on her different cultural threads, as she searches for her Lebanese great-grandmother for whom she was named.

Marguerite Guzman Bouvard is a resident scholar with the Women's Studies Program at Brandeis University