The conversation begins : mothers and daughters talk about living feminism / Christina Looper Baker and Christina Baker Kline.

In this timely, important, and compelling exploration of mother-daughter relationships, Christina Looper Baker and her daughter Christina Baker Kline bring us the provocative dialogue between two generations of feminists based on revealing interviews with prominent mothers and daughters.

Baker and Kline draw on talks with a diverse range of women of both generations in an attempt to bridge the gap between them. Mothers and daughters tell their stories in first-person narratives that explore their development as feminists, their lives as women, and their relationships with one another. Women of the Second Wave of American feminism - including Paula Gunn Allen, Helen Rodriguez-Trias, Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbara Seaman, Joy Harjo, Patsy Mink, Nkenge Toure, Eleanor Smeal, and many others - address the pressures of their dual roles as mothers and activists, the particular challenges posed by applying their feminist principles to raising their daughters, and their hopes for their daughters' futures. The daughters, many of whom count themselves among the emerging Third Wave, discuss the effects - both positive and negative - of growing up in a household where the personal is political.

They speak about the values and lessons their mothers instilled in them, and the ways in which they would like to emulate - or distance themselves from - their mothers as role models.