Chodorow, Nancy

Nancy Chodorow (b. 1944) is an internationally acclaimed sociologist, feminist theorist, and practicing psychoanalyst. She was born in New York City, on January 20, 1944, the daughter of Marvin and Leah (Turitz) Chodorow. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1966 and earned her PhD in sociology from Brandeis University in 1975. Chodorow is regarded as a founding scholar of second-wave feminist theory based on her groundbreaking book The Reproduction of Mothering ([1978] 1999), an account that challenged normative views about gender: how individuals come to see themselves as masculine or feminine. That work won the Jessie Bernard Award from Sociologists for Women in Society (1979) and was named one of the “Ten Most Influential Books of the Past Twenty-Five Years” in the social sciences (Contemporary Sociology 1996). It has been translated into seven languages.

While first making her mark in the field of gender studies, Chodorow's enduring contribution to social theory is her focus on the inextricable links between self and society. The scope of her work is wide-ranging, from her “grand” theory about the social and cultural reproduction of gender identity, difference, and inequalities (1978) to her clinically informed account of psychological gender (a sense that one is male or female) and critique of postmodernismpoststructuralism (1999) to her rethinking of what constitutes sexuality in psychoanalytic thought (1994, 2000) to her most recent reconsideration of the psychology of biological and bodily experiences, such as fertility and aging (2003).

Chodorow was trained in the fields of anthropology and sociology and later trained as a clinical psychoanalyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. Her melding of these disciplines is unique and controversial within the social sciences. She argues that individual feelings, fantasies, and unconscious conflicts are bound up in, but not reducible to, cultural mandates about gender and sexuality and that efforts to explain gendered patterns in psychological life need not be at odds with “clinical individuality and personal uniqueness” ([1978] 1999:xv). Chodorow's keen sense that generalizations and theory building as well as clinical treatment depend upon close observation of individuals who have distinctive, rich inner worlds and who live in a particular place at a particular historical point in time aligns well with developments in the sociology of emotions, psychological anthropology, cultural psychology, and feminist relational psychology, all fields upon which she has had major influence.

Chodorow has had an impact on the field of sociology with her trenchant critique of theories of gender socialization, arguing that boys and girls do not learn to take on masculine or feminine traits by imitating others or because they are forced to do so, but because these gender traits become deeply and personally meaningful to them. Chodorow uses an object relations psychoanalytic perspective to frame her theory of gender. She argues that intrapsychic relational family dynamics (specifically early maternal-child relationships of attachment and separation) result in distinct gendered identities and personalities. According to this view, both girls and boys begin life experiencing a feeling of oneness or identification with their maternal caregiver. Over [Page 93]the course of their development, however, boys and girls experience themselves differently in relation to their mothers. Equally important, women experience their mothering of boy children differently from their mothering of girl children. This acknowledgment of maternal subjectivity is a key element of Chodorow's theorizing, especially in light of the prevailing idealizations of motherhood that denied other parts of women's lives and identities in favor of children's (insatiable) needs. This axiomatic feature of Chodorow's work—that women bring distinctive desires, meanings, and motives to their experiences of mothering and sense of themselves in relation to their children—set the stage for a feminist rethinking of mother and child development that she and others have developed further (Chodorow and Contratto 1982).

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