Girl Rearing

This is a memoir about growing up female in America. The last of four daughters, the author grows up in the wake of tragedy when her sister drowns, and is brought up under the authority of her mother's ideas of proper cleanliness, posture and feminine destiny. Never fulfilling expectations, she makes a doomed marriage and suffers a breakdown, but gradually her own voice emerges, one that has negotiated her mother's ideas of the feminine with her own rebellion. She must raise her own daughter and once again face the mysteries of her mother's feminine arts.