News of a Rosie’s Daughter

Post #24 – Rosie’s Daughters: The “First Woman To” Generation Tells Its Story by Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett

What have Rosie’s Daughters been doing? That’s the question that Kendra Bonnett and I have been investigating. I’ve just finished interviews with a number of Rosie’s Daughters in order to look at the decade of their 60s, the decade between the initial interviews in 2000 and 2010. We’ve been eager to examine both the ten years that have just passed as well as the expectations and aspirations for the coming decade.

While doing my research, I noted the loss of one special Rosie Daughter mentioned in the first edition of this book — Jill Clayburgh. She died November 5 last year. You may have noticed the news story. But if you didn’t, she had chronic leukemia for 21 years before dying of complications of the disease. This means she must have been diagnosed about ten years after starring in the 1978 Oscar-nominated An Unmarried Woman, a movie that meant a lot to many of us in the Rosie’s Daughters generation.

I found a quote from Clayburgh that seems particularly appropriate for all of us to consider, independent of our age. She said, “Happiness is, as Freud said, love and work.”

Clayburgh loved her work as an actor and strove to perfection, a state we never achieve but a goal worth pursuing. She also had a close family and found much love there. I’m glad she found happiness and wish all our readers success in both love and work.

Want to know more about memoir writing? Kendra and I took our experiences from writing a memoir and teaching memoir writing and have created a website designed for women who are interested in creating their own life legacy for their family. To visit that site, click here.