Similarly, in “Walker Brothers Cowboy” (1968), the reader meets another young girl coming of age. Essential to the story is the relationship between the first-person narrator and her father. The narrator avoids identifying herself with the mother whom she apprehends to be ridiculed by the neighbors and idealizes instead her more relaxed father. Chodorow notes that the father´s role “serve[s] in part to break a daughter´s primary unit with and dependence on her mother. For this and a number of other reasons, fathers and men are idealized” (The
Reproduction of Mothering 195). The young girl accompanies her cheerful and adventurous father on one of his sales trips while the sickly mother stays at home. During the trip, the young narrator