Connected by Generations. By Kathleen Woodward.

"I was 10 and on vacation with my father's parents. My grandfather stayed behind (he always did) while my grandmother and I went down to the beach. It was too cold to swim, it was our first day, and so we walked along the water's edge to the rocks at the far end of the shore. I remember climbing those rocks for hours. What we had forgotten, of course, was the deceptive coolness of the sun. We returned to the hotel, our skin painfully, desperately burned. We could put nothing against our bodies. Not a single sheet. We lay still and naked on the twin beds, complaining, laughing, talking. Two twinned, different, sunburned bodies - the body of a 10-year old girl and the body of a 62-year-old woman. 

To my mind's retrospective eye it is crucial that this scene is not a story of the mother and the daughter, a story whose psychoanalytic plot revolves around identification and separation, intimacy and distance (...). Instead it is a story of an older woman (surely a missing person in psychoanalysis) and a young girl who are separated by some fifty years. Yet I do not want to say that the two of them are divided by generations. Rather, they are somehow connected by them." (Woodward , 1995:97)

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- Woodward, K. (1995). Tribute to the Older Woman. Psychoanalysis, feminism, and ageism. in M. Featherstone and A. Wernick (eds) Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, pp. 79-96. London: Routledge.

- photograph by Martin Parr via