Chodorow, Nancy

Sociologist, psychoanalyst, and professor Nancy Julia Chodorow is a leading scholar in the fields of feminist psychology, psychoanalysis, and sociology and has helped link these fields through her interdisciplinary approach. She has written numerous essays and groundbreaking books, including The Reproduction of Mothering, which is widely considered to be a classic in its field.

Topics she has helped bring to prominence include female psychology and the psychology of motherhood, psychoanalysis, the social construction of gender formation and identity, and object-relations theory. Her work offers both a critique and an alternative to patriarchal society and the belief that women are biologically predetermined to the role of nurturer, which she feels is the foundation for male dominance.

Nancy Chodorow received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1966 and her Ph.D. in sociology from Brandeis University in 1975. She received her psychoanalytic training at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. She has taught Women's Studies at Wellesley College and Sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of California at Berkeley. She retired from teaching in 2005. Her influences include the work of Beatrice and John W. M. Whiting, Philip Slater, Karen Horney, and Melanie Klein. Scholars consider her work to be an essential contribution to the Second Wave of feminism, which lasted approximately [Page 215]from the 1960s through the 1980s. Her research into mothering fit within the Second Wave of feminism's emphasis on issues of equality, including the basis for social and cultural inequality and ways to change the patriarchal nature of society.

Chodorow's sometimes controversial work approached psychoanalysis as an essentially interpretive field. She has also blended theoretical approaches with the recognition of each person's individual differences in both her scholarly work and her private psychoanalytic practice. Her work emphasized the necessity of considering cultural and historical influences on the formation of gender identity rather than universal generalizations concerning this process. Her interdisciplinary emphasis on cultural and historical relativity blended well with the discipline of sociology while her emphasis on gender, and the development of gender identity blended well with the discipline of feminist theory.

One of Chodorow's main interests was the search for psychological explanations for most women's desire for motherhood and female centrality in childcare across cultures and historical eras. She explored alternative theories to the traditional scientific theory that it was biological differences between the sexes that predisposed women to the nurturing roles of infant care and childrearing. The absence of biological determinism provided a basis for feminist challenges to the patriarchal basis of society and its cultural perspectives on the functions of motherhood. She determined that the cultural belief that child rearing is a woman's responsibility is the foundation of male dominance and the social and political oppression of women.

Chodorow's work also offered groundbreaking new perspectives on the mother-child relationship and how that relationship differed depending on the child's gender. Chodorow's use of object-relations theory was a unique approach among American psychoanalysts. Object-relations theory is based on the importance of an individual's formation of relationships, beginning with that between mother and infant, and the belief that the desire to form such bonds is a prime motivation for individuals throughout the course of their lives. She believed that mothers felt a stronger sense of unity with daughters because they shared the same sex while they naturally felt a sense of “other” with sons despite the closeness of the maternal bond. Object-relations theory became central to her work because she believed that the individual's perception of these relationships, both on the conscious and unconscious levels, was the key determinant in that individual's ability to form and maintain a variety of intimate adult relationships.

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