Dinnerstein, Dorothy

Dorothy Dinnerstein (1923–92) was an American feminist scholar and activist whose best-known study The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (1976) argues that, because child rearing is an essentially female occupation, it is responsible for the creation and the maintenance of gender inequalities. Thus, Dinnerstein viewed the unbalanced responsibility between genders in parenting not simply as a symptom of social oppression of women, but as the very cause that continued to perpetrate such oppression. To Dinnerstein, the fact that the responsibility of taking care of children is primarily assigned to the mother eventually causes a rejection of women and of responsibilities falling into the female sphere.

Dorothy Dinnerstein was born in New York City on April 4, 1923, into a Jewish family of Russian and Polish descent. Dinnerstein grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, and her parents' radicalism soon became an inspiration for her own political commitment to socialism. Dinnerstein's adolescence was marked by the Depression; her father, an architectural engineer, lost his job and died before the recession was over. Dinnerstein graduated from Brooklyn College in 1943 and was a graduate student at Swarthmore College, working under Wolfgang Kohler, father of Gestalt psychology, and Max Wertheimer.

She completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at the New School for Social Research under the supervision of Solomon Asch, a prominent social psychologist. Dinnerstein spent most of her teaching and academic career at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, where she cofounded the Institute for Cognitive Studies.

In The Mermaid and the Minotaur, Dinnerstein combined Freudian psychoanalysis and Gestalt psychology to trace the marginalization of women in society to motherhood. Because the child has an almost exclusive contact with the mother, he or she tends to see her as both a nurturer and a disciplinarian, an ambivalence they retain through adulthood. Because children are so dependent on their mothers, they come to view her as a threat to their identity and associate her with a state of dependency that, once adults, they do not want to reexperience. To her children, the mother represents an individual with power of life and death over them; because of this, she becomes an object of fear and is rejected in the children's adult lives.

Both sexes experience this sense of rejection toward the mother. Males turn this rejection in a consolidation of their masculine identity, which is tinged with sadistic attitudes toward women. Females equally feel this sense of rejection against their mothers, but because of their gender, they also tend to identify with such a figure. Thus, according to Dinnerstein, they turn their rage against the mother toward themselves in a masochistic attitude. The sole responsibility of child rearing assigned to a female figure conditions the future relationship of the adults with their mothers and fathers, as well as their sex lives and the way they interact with nature. Dinnerstein traces the abuse of “mother nature” to gender inequalities. The language of The Mermaid and the Minotaur thus conceives motherhood in almost apocalyptic terms, and the study marks a departure from Dinnerstein's early books, which were written in the tradition of empirical psychology.

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