Mothers and Daughters: A Seminar for Older Returning College Students

Abstract

Questions of identity and self-worth often nag at older women as they return to college. Many older women decide to return to college when they become involved in domestic crisis, separation, or divorce. Others, facing empty-nest syndrome, find that they have more time to pursue college study. For some older women, return to college is a chance to develop marketable job skills or a means of exploring a possible mid-career change. Many students come to Empire State College because they are hungry for an intellectual life, and many are convinced that their life experiences-years of child rearing, volunteer work, part-time jobs, or personal interests-will never mesh with their academic pursuits. During spring of 1977, we co-taught an interdisciplinary seminar on Mothers and Daughters, in which we integrated our interests and academic disciplines: literature and sociology. In studying topics like mother-daughter relationship, which build on personal knowledge, older women students discover that their own life experiences illuminate their studies and their studies illuminate their lives. In collective consideration of their roles and experiences, they also learn extent to which private experience is socially structured. In words of women's movement, they learn that the personal is political. Thirteen women students (including one graduate who had completed an independent project on this topic but wanted to be involved in group discussions) signed up for our seminar. We met regularly for three months in sessions which usually lasted well beyond two hours we had scheduled. The mother-daughter relationship was fast becoming a major focus of women's intellectual and emotional concerns; books exploring mother-daughter relationship were beginning to appear and, in plays and films, topic was attracting serious creative interest. A study of mother-daughter relationship, an exciting topic to explore and teach in many settings, had special appeal to our nontraditional older women students.