Influential figures can descend from households lacking maternal warmth

Evidence

Rosalie Silverman had been a beautiful girl, tall, statuesque, with a whiteness of skin that made her black hair and full red lips all the more striking. She aged early, however, and she aged hard, becoming terribly wrinkled and gaunt—her eyes sunken, her long thin nose jutting out sharply from the wrinkles. Only her hair remained youthful, and the fact that it stayed jet black until her death at the age of ninety-three led her family to believe she dyed it. She bore five children—Bella, three other girls and a son, David—but she was not the stereotype Jewish mother. In fact, when two of the girls—Emma, who had married banker Adolph Openhym, and Lydia, wife of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. partner Abraham Wolf—became fatally ill while still in their twenties, wasting away for months before they died, it was Bernhard, not Rosalie, who visited them every day and helped with the nursing. Rosalie, a relative recalls, “seemed to want to forget about them.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 115

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Men’s achievements often arise as rebellion against their mothers — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1724

Broader Connections

• Men’s achievements often arise as rebellion against their mothers #exemplifies (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1724