What Ever Happended to Daddy's Little Girl: The Impact of Fatherlessness on Black Women

What Ever Happened to Daddy's Little Girl: The Impact of Fatherlessness on Black Women

by Jonetta Rose Barras

One World, May 2000, $25.00, ISBN 0-345-42246-5

While its title appears to promise a factual exposition on the impact of absent fathers on black women, we really only learn its impact on the author and a few others. It is up to the reader to extrapolate further. Barras quickly shoots down her own premise by reminding us that fatherlessness is not a problem limited to or universal among blacks or black women. If you buy the well-worn argument that all mothers without men are victims and their children are doomed, this book may bolster that bias. She writes, "Do not women...also witness an indescribable pain that shadows them throughout their lives? Do they?" It is difficult to find a universal answer, if indeed there is one, in these pages.

The book is long on extraneous detail, but short on solutions. Overwriting tends to mask or overshadow what she may have to offer.

Sketchy statistics are included, and the bibliography lists many related books, including novels, but it is not apparent that she has drawn On them or used them effectively in her research and arguments.

The reader might be better served by selecting some of the more scholarly books from her source list. One wishes that it was more tightly edited and organized in a more accessible fashion. Barras has previously written, The Last of the Black Emperors: The Hollow Comeback of Marion Barry in the New Age of Black Leaders (Bancroft, 1998), which attracted similar criticism about its care and accuracy as well as some acclaim for taking on the mayor, and The Corner is No Place for Hiding (Crocodile Press, 1995), the poetry of which is sprinkled through this text.

She writes with such emotion (as if she herself is not healed) that it is difficult to see her as a source for advice. Her cure-all is Simple: forgive and you shall be healed. The book may be helpful to some who share her pain (and feel helped by others' tales of woe) or who want to understand women who feel abandoned because:they were not reared by the men who gave them life. It might even move some fathers and mothers to do more to maintain ties for their daughters, or some adult daughters to go talk to the person they believe has abandoned them. But for many readers it may ring hollow, laying open old wounds and falling short on the salves and gauze necessary to help them heal properly.

Photo (Jonetta Rose Barras)