4 ideas
Reb Smolinsky, a Talmud scholar on the Lower East Side, does no paid work and lives off his wife's and daughters' wages. He drives off his older daughters' chosen suitors and matches them to men who ruin them: Bessie to a widowed fish peddler, Mashah to a fake diamond dealer, Fania to a gambler. At seventeen Sara, the youngest, leaves home, irons in a laundry, studies at night, works her way through college and becomes a teacher.
The father's claim to holiness depends on an economic arrangement. His Torah study is funded by the wages of the women in his house. The same religious doctrine that ranks him above them also says a woman reaches heaven only through a father or husband. Piety works as a way to take their labor while calling the taking a spiritual order.
In a household where a daughter's value is her earning power or her marriage prospects, the father treats her choice of husband as a transaction he controls. He rejects suitors who might free her from him and chooses men who seem to bring money or status.
Winning independence from a controlling origin does not end the relationship to it. It changes the terms on which you carry it. Sara's professional, assimilated life gives her freedom, but it also costs her years of isolation. She still feels the pull of duty toward the father she fled, and the old world's weight comes back as an obligation she chooses rather than one forced on her.