The Daughters Project

by Aditi Rao

English 312 pages 1 edition

‘But single woman-ness was also what made her strong, single woman-ness was also what made her … just amazing.’ The Daughters Project explores what it means to grow up as a daughter in India, with a single woman as the centre of power and nurturance. Is the experience empowering? In stifling patriarchal societies like our own, do such daughters go on to inhabit a different sense of their place in the world? To answer these, and other, questions Aditi Rao spends four years interviewing seven daughters of single mothers, across lines of class, caste, religion, ethnicity, region, queerness and age-including the daughters of a Kashmiri militant, a Devadasi, a Tibetan refugee and a child-bride from Bangladesh. Interwoven with these oral testimonies are those of girls who witnessed abuse or who chose their own gender identity, and Aditi’s own experiences of being raised by a single mother, and as a single mother to an adopted child. Written with empathy, wisdom and acceptance, The Daughters Project allows mothers, who are frequently relegated to the margins, to assume centre stage. It also shows us that the single-mother home is not worse off, and could, in some ways, even be better off than the two-parent household.