Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities

Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978) helped rehabilitate psychoanalytic theory for feminism, which had rejected it on the grounds that Sigmund Freud's sexism invalidated all psychoanalytic insights, particularly those about women, femininity, and culture. Chodorow's book served as an introduction to object-relations theory and the work of Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, W. R. D. Fairbairn, and others. Object-relations theory focuses on the child's early relations to objects--persons, parts of the body, and toys or other "comforting" things. The most significant of these for object-relations analysts is the mother. Object-relations theory concentrates on the importance of the child's relation to the mother before he or she has a fully developed sense of self. The theory derived from the work of Melanie Klein, one of Freud's disciples. Klein theorized that children of both sexes must struggle to separate themselves from the mother and develop a distinct identity, a task that is doubly difficult for the boy because he must repudiate his original feminine attachment to, and identification with, the female parent.

Whereas Klein emphasized the importance of fantasy and unconscious aggressive drives, Winnicott and Fairbairn stress the significance of "real" relations between the child and the mother and other objects, as if these were direct and immediate rather than mediated by unconscious, repressed desires. The result is that the mother is made almost entirely responsible for the child's development.

It is this emphasis on the woman's total responsibility for child care that Chodorow critiques. She argues that this is what reproduces the gender differences of patriarchy. Because girls are mothered by someone of the same sex, their egos are more fluid than those of boys, and they experience a sense of connection with other people. Boys must exaggerate their differences from mothers and other women