The-Reproduction-Of-Mothering.Pdf

The Reproduction of Mothering Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender NANCY CHODOROW UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • London Contents Leah Turitz Chodorow and Marvin Chodorow Preface PART I: Setting the Problem: Mothering nncl the Social Organization of Gender 1. Introduction 2. Why Women Mother The Argument from Nature 13 The Role-Training Argument 30 3. Psychoanalysis and Sociological Inquhy Considerations on “Evidence” 52 University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California PART II: The Psychoanalytic Story University of California Press, Ltd. 4. Early Psychological Development London, England Total Dependence and the Narcissistic Relation Copyright © 1978 by to Reality 58 The Regents of the University of California Primary Love 62 The Beginnings of Self and the Growth of Object Love 67 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-27922 A Note on Exclusive Mothering 73 Printed in the United States of America 5 . The Relation to the Mother and the Mothering Relation First Paperback Printing 1979 The Effects of Early Mothering 77 ISBN: 0-520-03892-4 The Maternal Role 83 Conclusions 90 6. Gender Differences in the Preoedipal Period Early Psychoanalytic Formulations 93 The Reproduction of Mothering The Discovery of the Preoedipal Mother-Daughter Relationship 95 Preoedipal Mother-Daughter Relationships: The Clinical Picture 99 Preoedipal Mother-Son Relationships: The Clinical Picture 104 Conclusions 108 Preface Object-Relations and the Female Oedipal Configuration 111 Femininity: Women’s Oedipal Goal 111 The Relation to the Mother and the Feminine “Change of Object” 114 Relational Complexities in the Female Oedipus Situation 125 Oedipal Resolution and Adolescent. Replay 130 The Ongoingness of the Female Oedipus Situation 131 Mothers, Daughters, and Adolescence 133 This project owes its existence to the feminist movement and feminist Freud: Ideology and Evidence 141 community and its origins to a group of us who, several years ago, Bias in the Freudian Account 141 wondered what it meant that women parented women. Many of my Psychoanalytic Critiques of Freud 148 ideas were first developed with the members of the mother-daughter Biological Determinism 154 group. Conclusions on Post-Oedipal Gender Personality 159 Friends, colleagues, and teachers have given important advice, Family Relations and Oedipal Experience 160 encouragement, and criticism during the years I have worked on Post-Oedipal Gender Personality: A Recapitulation 164 this book. Many people carefully read drafts at various stages and gave me extensive, thoughtful criticism. I want especially to thank PART III: Egon Bittner, Jay Cantor, Margaret Cerullo, Rose Laub Coser, Bar Gender Personality and the Reproduction of Mothering bara Deck, Barbara Easton, George Goethals, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, Lillian Breslow Rubin, Neil Smelser, The Sexual Sociology of Adult Life 173 Judith Stacey, Barrie Thorne, Gwendolyn Wright, and Eli Zaretsky for Gender Identification and Gender Role Learning 173 their important, generous assistance and support. Discussions with Family and Economy 178 Samuel Bowles, Plerbert Gintis, Heidi Hartmann, Nancy Jay, and Mothering, Masculinity, and Capitalism 180 Abby Wolfson helped me to clarify and solidify my ideas. William The Psychodynamics of the Family 191 Friedland and John Kitsuse also made helpful suggestions about the Oedipal Asymmetries and Heterosexual Knots 191 manuscript. The Cycle Completed: Mothers and Children 199 I benefited from the special expertise of many people. David Gender Personality and the Reproduction of Plotke was a valuable intellectual and political critic, as well as an ex traordinary editor. Eileen van Tassell contributed extensive com Mothering 205 ments and suggestions to the sections on biology and saved me from several mistakes. Egon Bittner taught me how to think about and Afterword: Women’s Mothering and Women’s Liberation 211 write theory. Several people taught me about psychoanalytic theory Notes 221 and the importance of its clinical foundations: George Goethals, Ilse Bibliography 241 K. Jawetz, Malkah Notman, Bennett Simon, Edmund C. Payne, and Index 257 Paul L. Watson. Caryl Hashitani gave me excellent research help. Vll The Reproduction of Mothering Diane Ketroser did expert work typing the manuscript. Judith Bur ton did the mammoth and thankless job of compiling and typing the book’s footnotes and bibliography. Michael Reich has been throughout this project unendingly en couraging. He has read and discussed with me at length countless drafts of sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, and the final product PART I: bears the mark of his careful and critical intellect. His supportiveness and nurturance undercut one main argument of this book. I did not take everyone’s suggestions and did not always learn well. Final responsibility for this work is of course my own. I was supported during parts of the writing by a National Science Foundation Pre- Doctoral Research Fellowship, a National Institutes of Mental Health Dissertation Fellowship, and faculty research funds granted by the Setting the Problem: University of California, Santa Cruz. I would like to forewarn readers about language. This book is Mothering and the meant for people concerned with the family and sexual inequality, many of whom will not have a background in psychoanalysis. It also is meant to invite reflection by those in the psychoanalytic field itself, to encourage them to focus on the sociological and structural foun Social Organization dations of what they observe mainly in individual clinical manifesta tions. Such a dual goal is difficult. Anyone familiar with Freud’s more technical writings, let alone with psychoanalytic writing since Freud, of Gender knows that psychoanalytic language is convoluted and self-enclosed. Translation from this language is difficult. Since most psychoanalytic dialogue takes place among those who have already had several years of psychiatric or psychological clinical practice and study, there is not great incentive to simplify. I have tried to overcome these problems, and to make this a sociological work, while retaining the subtlety and complexity of the psychoanalytic description. 1 Introduction Women mother. In our society, as in most societies, women not only bear children. They also take primary responsibility for infant care, spend more time with infants and children than do men, and sustain primary emotional ties with infants. When biological mothers do not parent, other women, rather than men, virtually always take their place. Though fathers and other men spend varying amounts of time with infants and children, the father is rarely a child’s primary parent. Over the past few centuries, women of different ages, classes, and races have moved in and out of the paid labor force. Marriage and fertility rates have fluctuated considerably during this same period. Despite these changes, women have always cared for children, usually as mothers in families and occasionally as workers in child-care cen ters or as paid and slave domestics. Women’s mothering is one of the few universal and enduring elements of the sexual division of labor. Because of the seemingly natural connection between women’s childbearing and lactation capacities and their responsibility for child care, and because humans need extended care in childhood, women’s mothering has been taken for granted. It has been assumed to be inevitable by social scientists, by many feminists, and certainly by those opposed to feminism. As a result, although women’s mothering is of profound importance for family structure, for relations between the sexes, for ideology about women, and for the sexual division of labor and sexual inequality both inside the family and in the nonfa- milial world, it is rarely analyzed. This book analyzes women’s mothering and, in particular, the way women’s mothering is reproduced across generations. Its central 3 4 The Reproduction of Mothering Introduction 5 question is how do women today come to mother? By implication, it sphere of society.3 Women’s family role became centered on child asks how we might change things to transform the sexual division of care and taking care of men. This role involved more than physical labor in which women mother. labor. It was relational and personal and, in the case of both children and men, maternal. The early capitalist period in the United States Historically, the actual physical and biological requirements of produced an ideology of the “moral mother” :4 Bourgeois women childbearing and child care have decreased. But mothering is still were to act as both nurturant moral models to their children and as performed in the family, and women’s mothering role has gained nurturant supporters and moral guides for husbands on their return psychological and ideological significance, and has come increasingly from the immoral, competitive world of work. The ideology of the to define women’s lives. moral mother has lost some of its Victorian rigidity, but it has also Two centuries ago, marriage, especially for women, was essentially spread throughout society. Women of all classes are now expected to synonymous with child-rearing.1 One spouse was likely to die before nurture and support husbands in addition to providing them with the children were completely reared, and the other spouse’s death food and a clean house. would probably follow within a few years of the last child’s marriage. As women’s mothering became less entwined

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