Читать книгу Black Women's Health - Michele Tracy Berger - Страница 16

How mothers define health, their health experiences, and expectations for themselves and their daughters are front and center in this chapter. It also investigates the ways that mothers communicate expectations about their daughters’ health. Four themes emerge in the mothers’ narratives of health: (1) mothering practices of health, (2) implicit and explicit barriers to health, (3) how race and gender inform their experiences navigating health care, and (4) their perceptions of risk of daughters’ health.

I examine several areas of narrative tension for mothers in how they discuss their health practices with their daughters and represent those practices to themselves. I capture the concept of legacies in mother and daughter communication and how mothers either borrow, incorporate, or reject communicative styles and patterns from their mothers. Mothers had a tendency to characterize themselves in opposition to their own mothers and grandmothers regarding health-care access, sexuality, and general openness of communication. These generational differences reveal how both their health and wellness are shaped by the ongoing legacies of the Jim Crow South and the shifting configurations of power, exclusion, segregation, and resistance.