The mother-daughter relationship is especially complex: being mothered well, as with much of the roll of the dice in life, is a bit of a lottery. Some of us get lucky and some of us don’t. The myths and taboos about “dissing”, or naming difficulties with our mothers, only serve to isolate those women who have not been the beneficiaries of an easy relationship.
It would be extremely negligent not to acknowledge the social and cultural constraints on mothering over generations. But this does not lessen the existence of negative impact, for daughters, of a destructive, cold or critical relationship with a mother. The consequences of difficult parenting, by either gender parent, to either gender of child, is not argued in terms of rank – just that there is something particular about mother-daughter relationships.