Career After Mother's Death
After Joan Crawford died in 1977, Christina and her brother Christopher learned that they had been disinherited from their mother's $2M estate in her will "for reasons which are well-known to them". In 1978 Crawford wrote the controversial book Mommie Dearest which revealed her mother to have been an abusive parent. The book made child abuse a prominent issue at a time when it was just beginning to be widely acknowledged as a public problem. In 1981, a movie version of the same title was released, starring Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and Diana Scarwid as Christina (teen and adult).
Christina has published subsequent books, including Survivor. For seven years she served as a member of Los Angeles' Inter-Agency Council on Abuse and Neglect Associates, during which time she campaigned for the reform of laws regarding child abuse. After a near-fatal stroke in 1981, Crawford spent five years in rehabilitation before moving to the Northwest, where she ran a bed and breakfast called "Seven Springs Farms" in Tensed, Idaho, between 1994 and 1999. She formed Seven Springs Press in 1998 to publish the 20th Anniversary Edition of Mommie Dearest in paperback from the original manuscript. This included material, omitted from the first printing, about the years following her graduation from high school. Christina Crawford continues in the capacity of company publisher. In 1999 Crawford began working as a "special events planner" at the Coeur d'Alene Casino in Idaho. On November 22, 2009, she was appointed county commissioner in Benewah County, Idaho by Governor Butch Otter, though she lost her bid for re-election in the November 2010 general election. In 2011 Crawford founded the non-profit Benewah Human Rights Coalition and served as the organization's first president.
Read more about this topic: Christina Crawford
Famous quotes containing the words career, mother and/or death:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to accept, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too—unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A.M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child’s trouble.”
—Anna Quindlen (20th century)
“The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone
In the ranks of death you’ll find him,
His father’s sword he has girded on,
And his wild harp slung behind him.”
—Thomas Moore (1779–1852)