Hope Edelman Builds Global Support Network for Motherless Women

Hope Edelman turned a personal loss into a shared lifeline. Twenty years ago, after publishing the bestseller Motherless Daughters, she founded a global support network for women who were young when their mothers died.

The network was built around a simple but urgent need: a place where motherless women could speak openly about grief that had followed them well into adulthood. Edelman’s effort offered more than sympathy. It gave members tears, sisterhood and affirmation, three things many women found harder to get from family, therapy or formal bereavement support.

That matters because losing a mother early does not stay fixed in childhood. It can shape identity, relationships and the way women understand themselves decades later, long after the funeral, long after the condolences stop, and long after others expect life to feel settled. Edelman’s network met that reality directly, connecting women across borders who recognized the same ache in one another’s stories.

Motherless Daughters helped make that experience visible, and the support network extended that visibility into community. Instead of treating early maternal loss as a private wound to be managed alone, Edelman created a place where women could name it together and see that the long tail of grief was neither rare nor shameful.

Two decades on, the network stands as a reminder that grief often needs peers as much as professionals. For women who lost mothers young, the need is not only to remember what was lost, but to find others who understand what remains.