1 11 The Sexual Sociology of Adult Life Hence, there is a typically asymmetrical relation of the marriage pair to the occupational structure, Thh asymmetrical relation apparently l/ailt has exceedingly important positive functional rignijirancť and is m the same ume an important sourer of strain in relation i" the patterning »/ wx rules. I Alt ill I I'AKSoss. "The Kinship S«M«-iii <»t ihe 0>meni|torar} I'uiinl Si hies" Girls and boys develop different relational capacities and senses of self as a result oľ growing up in a Family in which women mother. These gender personalities are reinforced by differences in the identification pro» esses ol boys and girls thai also resull (Vom women's mothering. Differing relational capacities and forms of identification prepare women and men to assume the adult gender roles which situate women primarily within the sphere ol reproduction in a sexually unequal society. >.l:.\ DER IDENTIFICATION AND GENDER ROLE LEARNING All social scientists who have examined processes of gender role learning and the development ol a sense of identification in boys and girls have argued that the asymmetrical organization of parenting in which women mother is the basic cause ol significant contrasts between feminine and masculine identification processes.' Their discussions range Írom concern with the learning of appropriate gender role behavior—through imitation, explicit training and admonitions, and cognitive learning processes—to concern with the development ol basic gender identity. The processes these people discuss seem to be universal, to the extent that all societies are constituted around a A 173 174 The Reproduction of Mothering structural split, growing out of women's mothering, between the private, domestic world of women and the public, social world of men.2 Because the first identification for children of both genders has always been with their mother, they argue, and because children are first around women, women's family roles and being feminine are more available and often more intelligible to growing children than masculine roles and being masculine. Hence, male development is more complicated than female because of the difficult shifts of identification which a boy must make to attain his expected gender identification and gender role assumption. Their view contrasts sharply to the psychoanalytic stress on the difficulties inherent in feminine development as girls make their convoluted way to heterosexual object choice.* Because all children identify first with their mother, a girl's gender and gender role identification processes are continuous with her earliest identifications and a boy's are not. A girl's oedipal identification with her mother, for instance, is continuous with her earliest primary identification (and also in the context of her early dependence and attachment). The boy's oedipal crisis, however, is supposed to enable him to shift in favor of an identification with his father. He gives up. in addition to his oedipal and preoedipal attachment to his mother. his primary identification with her. What is true specifically for oedipal identification is equally true for more general gender identification and gender role learning. A boy, in order to feel himself adequately masculine, must distinguish and differentiate himself from others in a way that a girl need not —must categorize himself as someone apart. Moreover, he defines masculinity negatively as that which is not feminine and/or connected to women, rather than positively.3 This is another way boys come to deny and repress relation and connection in the process ol growing up. These distinctions remain even where much of a girľs and boy's socialization is the same, and where both go to school and can participate in adulthood in the labor force and other nonfamilial institutions. Because girls at the same lime grow up in a family where mothers are the salient parent and caretaker, they also can begin to identify more directly and immediately with their mothers and their "Theexicm of masculine difficulty varies, as docs rhcexicnt to which idem ideation processes for boys and gn-ls differ. This variance depends on ihc cxieni of ihe publit-domestic split in a subculture or society—(he extent to which men, men's work, and masculine activities are removed from the home, and ilicrefore masculinity and personal relations wiih ad»ili men are hard to come by for a child. Sexual Sociology 175 others' familial roles than can boys with their fathers and men. Insofar as a woman's identity remains primarily as a wife/mother, moreover, there is greater generational continuity in role and life-activity from mother to daughter than there can be from father to son. This identity may be less than totally appropriate, as girls must realistically expect to spend much of their life in the labor force, whereas their mothers were less likely to do so. Nevertheless, family organization and ideology still produce these gender differences, and generate expectations that women much more than men will find a primary identity in the family. Permanent father-absence, and the "father absence" that is normal in our society, do not mean that boys do not learn masculine roles or proper masculine behavior, just as there is no evidence that homosexuality in women correlates with father absence.4 What matters is the extent to which a child of either gender can form a personal relationship with their object of identification, and the differences in modes of identification that result from this. Mitscherlich, Slater, Winch, and Lynn all speak to these differences.5 They suggest that girls in contemporary society develop a personal identification with their mother, and that a tie between affective processes and role learning—between libidinal and ego development—characterizes Feminine development. By contrast, boys develop a positional identification with aspects of the masculine role. For them, the tie between affective processes and role learning is broken. Personal identification, according to Slater and Winch, consists in diffuse identification with someone else's general personality, behavioral trails, values, and attitudes. Positional identification consists, by contrast, in identification with specific aspects of another's role and does not necessarily lead to the internalization of the values or ;itti-[ tudes of the person identified with. According to Slater, children preferentially choose personal identification because this grows out I of a positive affective relationship to a person who is there. They re-| sort to positional identification residually and «actively, and identify with the perceived role or situation of another when possibilities for personal identification are not available. In our society, a girl's mother is present in a way that a boy's father, and oiher adult men, are not. A girl, then, can develop a personal identification with her mother, because she has a real relationship with her that grows out of their early primary lie. She learns what it is to be womanlike in the context of this personal identification with her mother and often with other female models (kin, teachers, mothers friends, mothers of friends). Feminine identification, then. 176 The Reproduction 0/ Mothering can be based 011 the gradual learning of a way of being familiar in everyday lite, exemplified by the relationship with the person with whom a girl has been most involved. A boy must attempt to develop a masculine gender identification and learn the masculine role in the absence of a continuous and ongoing personal relationship to his father (and in the absence of a con-linuouslv available masculine role model). This positional identification occurs both psychologically and sociologically. Psychologically, as is clear from descriptions of the masculine oedipus complex, boys appropriate those specific components of the masculinity of their father thai they lear will be oiherwise used against (hem. but do not as much identify diffusely with him as a person. Sociologically. boys in falher-ahseiii and nonnalh father-remote families develop a sense of what it is 10 be masculine through identification with cultural images of masculinity and men chosen as masculine models. Boys are taught to be masculine more consciously than girls are taught to be feminine. When fathers or men are not present much, girls are taught the heterosexual components of their role, whereas boys are assumed to learn their heterosexual role without teaching. through interaction with their mother." By contrast, other components of masculinity must be more consciously imposed. Masculine identification, then, is predominantly a gender role identification- By contrast, feminine identification is predominantly parental: "Males tend to identify with a cultural stereotype of the masculine role; whereas females tend 10 identify with aspects of their own mothers role specifically."7 Girls' identification processes, then, are more continuously embedded in and mediated by their ongoing relationship with then mother. They develop through and stress particularistic and affective relationships to others. A boy's identification processes are not likely to l>e so embedded in or mediated by a real affective relation to his father. At the same lime, lie tends to deny identification with and relationship to his mother and reject what he takes to be the feminine world; masculinity is defined as much negatively as positively. Masculine identification processes stress differentiation from others, the denial of affective relation, and categorical universalistic components of the masculine role. Feminine identification processes are relational, whereas masculine identification processes tend to deny relationship. These distinctions do not mean that the development of femininity is all sugar and spice for a girl, but that it poses different kinds ol problems lor her than the devclopmeni of masculinity does for a boy. Sexuaf Sociology / 77 The feminine identification that a girl attains and the masculine identification about which a boy remains uncertain are valued differently. In their unattainability, masculinity and the masculine role are fantasized and idealized by boys (and often by girls), whereas femininity and the feminine role remain for a girl all too real and concrete. The demands on women are often contradictory—for instance, to l>c passive and dependent in relation to men. and active and independently initialing toward children. In the context of the ego and object-relational issues I described in the preceding chapters, moreover, it is clear that mother-identification presents difficulties. A girl identifies with and is expected to identify with her mother in order to attain her adult feminine identification and learn her adult gender role. At the same time she must be sufficiently differentiated to grow up and experience herself as a separate individual—must overcome primary identification while maintaining and building a secondarv identification. Studies suggest that daughters in American society have problems with differentiation from and identification with their mothers." Slater reports that all forms of personal parental identification (cross-gender and same-gender} correlate with freedom from |>sychosis or neurosis except personal identification of a daughter with her mother. Johnson reports that a boys identification with his father relates to psychological adjust mem, whereas a girls with her mother does not. The implication in both accounts is that for a girl, just as for a bov. there can be Kto much of mother. It may l>e easy, but possibly too easy, for a girl to attain a feminine gender identification.* Gender and gender-role identification processes accord with my earlier account of the development of psychic structure. They reinforce and replicate the object-relational and ego outcomes which I have described. Externally, as internally, women grow up and remain more connected to others. Not only are the roles which girls learn more interpersonal, particularistic, and affective than those which boys learn. Processes of identification and role learning for girls also tend to be particularistic and affective—embedded in an interpersonal relationship with their mothers. For boys, identification processes and masculine role learning are not likely to be embedded in relationship with their fathers or men but rather to involve the denial of affective relationship to their mothers. These processes tend to be "lore role-defined and cultural, to consist in abstract or categorical ""ole learning rather than in personal identification. »Recall iilso Deutsch"* descriptor, oi the prepubertal girl's random auempu 10 *>reak tier identification with tier moibei. 178 The Reproduction of Mothering FAMILY AND ECONOMY Women's relatedness and men's denial of relation and categorical self-definiiion are appropriate to women's and men's differential participation in nonfamilial production and familial reproduction. Women's roles are basically familial, and concerned with personal. affective ties. Ideolog)- about women and treatment of them in this society« particularly in the labor force, tend to derive from this familial location and the assumptions that it is or should be both exclusive and primary for women, and that this exclusivity and primacy come from biological sex differences. By contrast, men's roles as they are defined in our society are basically not familial. Though men are interested in being husbands and fathers, and most men do occupy these roles during their lifetime, ideology about men and definitions of what is masculine come predominantly from men's nonfamilial roles. Women are located first in the sex-gender system, men first in the organization of production. We can reformulate these insights to emphasize that womeiťs lives, and beliefs about women, define them as embedded in social interaction and personal relationships in a way that men are not. Though men and women participate in both the family and the nonfamilial world, the sexual division of labor is such that women's first association is within the family, a relational institution, and men's is not. Women in our society are primarily defined as wives and mothers, thus in particularistic relation to someone else, whereas men are defined primarily in universalistic occupational terms. These feminine roles and women's family functions, moreover, stress especially affective relationship and the affective aspects of family life. As I discuss in Chapter I, being a mother and wife are increasingly centered on emotional and psychological functions—women's work is "emotion work."9 By contrast, men's occupational roles, and the occupational world in general, are increasingly without room for affect and particularistic commitments. Women's two interconnected roles, their dual relatedness to men and children, replicate women's internalized relational triangle of childhood—preoccupied alternately with male-female and mother-child issues. The definitional relatedness of being a wife and mother, and women's intrafamilial responsibility for affectively defined functions, receive further support from the way the family is related socially to the extrafamilial world. Parsons and many feminist theorists point out that it is the husband/father whose occupational role is mainly deter- Sextuif Sociology 119 minant of the class position and status of the whole family, and sociologists who measure socioeconomic status by paternal occupation and education seem to concur. The husband/father thus formally articulates the family in the larger society and gives it its place. And although families increasingly depend on income from both spouses, class position derives ideologically from what the male spouse does. The wife, accordingly, is viewed as deriving her status and class position mainly from her husband, even if she also is in the labor force and contributes to the maintenance of the family's life style- She is seen as a representative of her family, whereas her husband is seen as an independent individual. The wife/mother role draws on women's personality in another way, as a result of the fundamentally different modes of organization of the contemporary sex-gender system and contemporary capitalism. The activities of a wife/mother have a nonbounded quality. They consist, as countless housewives can attest and as women poets, novelists, and feminist theorists have described, of diffuse obligations. Women's activities in the home involve continuous connection to and Concern about children and attunement to adult masculine needs, both of which require connection to, rather than separateness from, others. The work of maintenance and reproduction is characterized by its repetitive and routine continuity, and does not involve specified sequence or progression. By contrast, work in the labor force—"men's work"—-is likely to be contractual, to be more specifically delimited, and to contain a notion of defined progression and product. Even when men and women cross into the other's sphere, their roles remain different. Within the family, being a husband and father is different from being a wife and mother; as women have become more involved in the family, men have become less so. Parsons's characterization of men's instrumental role in the family may be too extreme, but points us in the right direction. A father's first responsibility is to "provide" for his family monetarily. His emotional contribution is rarely seen as of equal importance. Men's work in the home, in all but a few households, is defined in gender-stereotyped ways. When men do "women's" chores—the dishes, shopping, putting children to bed—this activity is often organized and delegated by the wife/mother, who retains residual responsibility (men "babysit" their own children; women do not). Fathers, though they relate to their children, do so in order to create "independence."10 This is facilitated by a father's own previous socialization for repression and denial of relation, and his current participation in the public nonrelational world. Just as children know their fathers "under the sway 180 The Reproduction of Mothering oi the reality principle."*-11 so also do lathers know their children more as separate people than mothers do. Outside die family, women's roles and ideology about women are more relational than nonlamilial male roles and ideology about men. Women's work in the labor force tends to extend their housewife. wife, or mother roles and their concern with personal, affective ties (as secretaries, service workers, private household workers, nurses, teachers). Men's work is less likely to have affective overtones—men arc craft workers, operatives, and professional and technical workers. Rosaldo claims that all these aspects of women's position are universal.12 She suggests that feminine roles are less public or "social." thai they exhibit less linguistic and institutional differentiation, and that the interaction ihey involve is more likely to be kin-based and to cross generations, whereas men's interaction remains within a single generation and cuts across kin units on the basis of universal i sue categories. Women's roles are thus based on what are seen as personal rather than "social" or "cultural" ties. The corollary to this is that women's roles typically tend to involve the exercise of influence in face-to-face, personal contexts rather than legitimized power in contexts which are categorical and defined by authority. Finally, women's roles, and the biological symbolism attached to them, share a concern with the crossing of boundaries: Women mediate between the social and cultural categories which men have defined; they bridge the gap and make transitions—especially in their role as socialer and mother —between nature and culture. Women's role in the home and primary definition in social reproductive, sex-gender terms are characterized bv particularism, concern with affective goals and ties, and a diffuse, unbounded quality. Masculine occupational roles and men's primary definition in the sphere of production are universal is tically defined and recruited, and are less likely to involve affective considerations. This nonrelational, economic and political definition informs the rest of their lives. The production Of feminine personalities oriented toward relational issues and masculine personalities defined in terms of categorical ties and the repression of relation fits these roles and contributes to their reproduction. MOTHERING, MASCULINITY. AND CAPITALISM Women's mothering in the isolated nuclear family of contemporary capitalist society creates specific personality characteristics in men that •Conscious of him as a separate person, verbally rather lhan prcvcrbally. r Sexual Sociology 181 í reproduce both an ideology and psychodynamic of male superiority ^^* and submission to the requirements of production. It prepares men for participation in a m ale-dom i n ant family and society, for their lesser emotional participation in family life, and for their participation in the capitalist world of work. Masculine development takes place in a family in which women mother and fathers are relatively uninvolved in child care and family life, and in a society characterized by sexual inequality and an ideology of masculine superiority. This duality expresses itself in the family. In family ideology, fathers are usually important and considered the head of the household. Wives focus energy and concern on their husbands, or at least think and say that they do- They usually consider, or at least claim, that they love these husbands. Mothers may present fathers to children as someone important, someone whom the mother loves, and may even build up their husbands to their children to make up for the fact that these children cannot get to know their father as well as their mother. They may at the same »time undercut their husband in response to the position he assumes of social superiority or authority in the family. Masculinity is presented to a boy as less available and accessible than femininity, as represented by his mother. A boy's mother is his primary caretaker. At the same time, masculinity is idealized or accorded superiority, and thereby becomes even more desirable. Although fathers are not as salient as mothers in daily interaction, mothers and children often idealize them and give them ideological primacy, precisely because of their absence and seeming inaccessibility, and because of the organization and ideology of male dominance in the larger society. Masculinity becomes an issue in a way that femininity does not. Masculinity does not become an issue because of some intrinsic male biology, nor because masculine roles are inherently more difficult than feminine roles, however. Masculinity becomes an issue as a direct result of a boy's experience of himself in his family—as a result oi his being parented by a woman. For children of both genders, mothers represent regression and lack of autonomy. A boy associates these issues with his gender identification as well. Dependence on his mother, attachment to her, and identification with her represent that which is not masculine; a boy must reject dependence and deny attachment and identification. Masculine gender role training becomes much more rigid than feminine. A boy represses those qual ities he takes to be feminine inside himself, and rejects and devalues women and whatever he considers to be feminine in the social world. k 182 The Reproduction of Mothering Thus, boys define and attempt to construct their sense of masculinity largely in negative terms. Given that masculinity is so elusive. it becomes important for masculine identity that certain social activities are defined as masculine and superior, and thai women are be-lievcd unable to do many of the things defined as socially important. It becomes important to think that women's economic and social contribution cannot equal men's. The secure possession of certain realms, and the insistence that these realms are superior to the maternal world of youth, become crucial both to the definition of masculinity and to a particular boy's own masculine gender identification.13 Freud describes the genesis of this stance in the masculine oedipal crisis. A boy's struggle to free himself from his mother and become masculine generates "the contempt fell by men for a sex which is the lesser"14—"What we have come to consider the normal male contempt for women."15 Both sexes learn to feel negatively toward their mother during the oedipal period. A girl's negative feelings, however, are not so much contempt and devaluation as fear and hostility: "The little girl, incapable of such contempt because of her own identical nature, frees herself from the mother with a degree of hostility far greater than any comparable hostility in the boy."1* A boy's contempt serves to free him not only from his mother but also from the femininity within himself. It therefore becomes entangled with the issue of masculinity and is generalized to all women. A girl's hostility remains lied more to her relationship to her mother (and/or becomes involved in self-depreciation), A boy's oedipus complex is directly tied to issues of masculinity, and the devaluation of women is its "normal" outcome. A girl's devaluation of or hostility toward her mother may be a part of the process, but its "normal" outcome, by contrast, entails acceptance oi her own femininity and identification with her mother. Whatever the individual resolution of the feminine oedipus complex, however, it does not become institutionalized in the same way. Freud "explains" the development of boys'contempt for mothers as coming from their perception of genital differences, particularly their mother's "castration." He takes this perception to be unme-diated by social experience, and not in need of explanation. As many commentators have pointed out. it did not occur to Freud that such differential valuation and ensuing contempt were not in the natural order of things. However, the analysis of "Little Hans," which provides the most direct (reported) evidence that Freud had for such an assumption, shows that in fact Hans's father perpetuated and created such beliefs in his son—beliefs about the inferiority of female geni- Sexual Sociology 183 talia, denial of the feminine role in gestation and parturition, views that men have something and women have nothing, rather than having something different.17 Karen Homey, unlike Freud, does take masculine contempt for and devaluation of women as in need of interactive and developmental explanation.18 According to her, these phenomena are manifestations of a deeper "dread of women"—a masculine fear and terror of maternal omnipotence that arises as one major consequence of their early caretaking and socialization by women. Psychoanalysts previously had stressed boys' fears of their fathers. Homey argues that these fears are less severe and therefore less in need of being repressed. Unlike their fears of a mother, boys do not react to a father's total and incomprehensible control over his child's life at a time when the child has no reflective capacities for understanding: ''Dread of the father is more actual and tangible, less uncanny in quality.""1 Moreover, since their father is male like them, boys' fears of men do not entail admission of feminine weakness or dependency on women: "Masculine self-regard suffers less in this way."20 Dread or the mother is ambivalent, however. Although a boy fears her. he also finds her seductive and attractive. He cannot simply dismiss and ignore her. Boys and men develop psychological and cultural/ideological mechanisms to cope with their fears without giving up women altogether. They create folk legends, beliefs, and poems that ward off the dread by externalizing and objectifying women: "It is not. . . that I dread her; it is that she herself is malignant, capable of any crime, a beast of prey, a vampire, a witch, insatiable in her desires . .. the very personification of what is sinister."21 They deny dread at the expense of realistic views of women. On the one hand, they glorify and adore: "There is no need for me to dread a being so wonderful, so beautiful, nay. so saintly."" On the other, they disparage: "It would be too ridiculous to dread a creature who, if you take her all round, is such a poor thing."23 Unfortunately, Horney does not point to developmental implications of the mother's overwhelming power for girls. We can apply here the difference I noted earlier. A girl may well develop a fear or dread of her mother. However, this dread does not become tied up for her with the assertion of genderedness. Because she is also female, and presumably does not feel herself dreadful or fearsome, but rather the reverse, it is likely that a girl will not generalize her dread to all females. Moreover, because women's and girls' experiences take place in a male-dominant society, whatever fear or dread individual dornen do experience is less likely to gain cultural or normative import. 184 The Reproduction of Molhering Horney's article implicitly claims that fear and disparagement of women and assertions of masculine superiority are universal. This claim needs further specification, since the extent of men's "dread of women" and need to assert, masculine superiority varies widely among different societies.44 Homey noticed the dread of women because it was salient in her own society. Tendencies in contemporary family Organization have produced a mother-son relationship that leads to disparagement and fear of women. Direct patriarchal authority and paternal salience in the family have declined as a result of men's steady loss of autonomy in work, and the growing submission of their lives to work requirements (whether the work of bureaucratized and salaried professionals and managers, or of prolctarianized craft workers and small entrepreneurs).25 Crete Bibring provides a suggestive clinical account. She describes the fathers and mothers in "matriarchal" families in the United Stales*2" As described by their grown sons and daughters (Bibring's patients), the mothers in these households were active and strong, efficient household managers, and generally seemed superior and more competent than their husbands. Fathers were generally ineffectual in the home and uninvolved in family life. (Bibring seems to lx.* talking about professional, middle- and upper-middle-class husbands. What she says, however, would seem to apply equally to working-class households, where fathers have jobs which keep them away even longer hours, may exhaust them even more, and where much social life is sex-segregated.) Bibring summarizes the situation: Ai closer investigation ii seems cvideni that in all ihese cases ihe father did not participate essentially in the upbringing of his children, thai social as well as moral standards, religious and aesthetic values were mostly conveyed by the mother. The same holds true of praise and reprimands. The setting «I goals and the supervision ol the boy's development lay in het- hands. The lather appears in all these instances as a friendly onlooker raiher than as an important participant.*7 The sons in these families considered their mothers to be rejecting, punitive, ambitious, and cold. But the women who grew up in this "matriarchal" setting were less likely to reject the feminine role than female patients coming from patriarchal family settings. Bibring concludes, guided by the sons' concrete descriptions of their mothers' behavior, that the mothers were thoughtful and responsible and thai *Horkhcimcr suggests, in Contrast to Bihriiig, [hat in Germany ;ii least il«* definic in r^al paternal authority and power was accompanied by a rise in what we might call pseudo-authority. Sexual Sociology 185 the fathers' "absence," rather than anything the mother actually did, was the "major factor in determining these attitudes in the sons."2" For these sons, whatever the social reality and however their mother acted, there was simply "too much of mother."2* Sons in this situation inevitably experience their mother as overwhelming and resent her for this. They both admire and fear her, experience her as both seductive and rejecting. In such a situation, mothers themselves may also reciprocate and encourage their sons' incestuous wishes as well as their infantile dependence. As Bibring puts ti, they are "as much in need of a husband as a son is of his father."30 Moreover, because there is no mediator to his oedipal wishes—no father to protect him—a boy's wishes also build. He often projects both these and the fears they engender onto his mother, making her both a temptress and hostile punisher. Sons take these fears with them into adulthood and experience the world as filled with "dangerous, cold, cutting women."31 Too much of mother results from the relative absence of the father and nearly exclusive maternal care provided by a woman isolated in a nuclear household. It creates men's resentment and dread of women, and their search for nomhreatening, undemanding, dependent, even infantile women—women who are "simple, and ihus safe and warm."32 Through these same processes men come to reject, devalue, and even ridicule women and things feminine. Women's mothering produces a psychological and ideological complex in men concerning women's secondary valuation and sexual inequality. Because women are responsible for early child care and for most later socialization as well, because fathers are more absent from the home, and because men's activities generally have been removed from the home while women's have remained within it, boys have difficulty in attaining a stable masculine gender role identification. Boys fantasize about and idealize ihe masculine role and their fathers, and society defines it as desirable. Given that men control not only major social institutions but ihe very definition and constitution of society and culture, they have the power and ideological means to enforce these perceptions as more general norms, and to hold each other accountable for their enforcement. (This is not solely a matter of force. Since these norms define men as superior, men gain something by maintaining them.33) The structure of parenting creates ideological and psychological modes which reproduce orientations to and structures of male dominance in individual men, and builds an assertion of male superiority into the definition of masculinity itself. 186 The Reproduction of Mothering The same repressions, denials of affect and attachment, rejection of the world of women and things feminine, appropriation of the world of men and identification with the father that creaie a psychology of masculine superiority also condition men for participation in the capitalist work world. Both capitalist accumulation and proper work habits in workers have nevěr been purely a matter of economics. Particular personality characteristics and behavioral codes facilitated the transition to capitalism. Capitalists developed inner direction, rational planning, and organization, and workers developed a willingness to come to work at certain hours and work steadily, whether or not they needed money that day. Psychological qualities become perhaps even more important with the expansion of bureaucracy and hierarchy: In modern capitalism different personality traits are required at different levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy.*34 Lower level jobs are often directly and continuously supervised, and are best performed by someone willing to obey rules and conform to external authority. Moving up the hierarchy, jobs require greater dependability and predictability, the ability to act without direct and continuous supervision. In technical, professional, and managerial positions, workers must on their own initiative cany out the goals and values of the organization for which they work, making those goals and values their own. Often they must be able to draw on their interpersonal capacities as a skill. Parental child-rearing values and practices (insofar as these latter reflect parental values) reflect these differences: Working class parents are more likely to value obedience, conformity to external authority, neatness, and other "behavioral" characteristics in their children; middle-class parents emphasize more "internal" and interpersonal characteristics like responsibility, curiosity, self-motivation, self-control, and consideration.31 These behavioral and personality qualities differentiate appropriately according to the requirements of work in the different strata. But they share an important commonality. Conformity to behavioral rules and external authority, predictability and dependability, the. ability to take on others' values and goals as one's own, all reflect an orientation external to oneself and one's own standards, a lack of autonomous and creative' self-direction. The nuclear, isolated, neolocal family in which women mother is suited to the production in children of these cross-class personality commitments and capacities, "It is certainly possible that these same characteristics apply in all extensively bureaucratic and hierarchical settings (in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, For instance): however, the work 1 an» drawing on has investigated only the capitalist West, and especially the United States. Sexual Sociology 187 Parsonsians and theorists of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research have drawn on psychoanalysis to show how the relative position of fathers and mothers in the contemporary family helps to create the foundations of men's psychological acquiescence in capitalist domination.* They discuss how the family prepares men for subordination to authority, for participation in an alienated work world, for generalized achievement orientation.36 These complementary and overlapping accounts discuss personality traits required of all strata, centering on lack of inner autonomy and availability to manipulation. Yet their differences of emphasis point to variation among strata as well. Parsonsians discuss more how middle-class families prepare boys to be white-collar bureaucrats, professionals, technicians, and managers; Frankfurt theorists discuss more the genesis of working-class character traits. Parsonsians start from the growing significance of the mother, and her sexualized involvement with her male infant. Frankfurt theorists start from the historical obverse, from the decline in the father's role and his growing distance, unavailability, and loss of authority in the family. In American families. Parsons argues, where mothers tend not to have other primary affective figures around, a mutual erotic investment between son** and mother develops—an investment the mother can then manipulate. She can love, reward, and frustrate him at appropriate moments in order to get him to delay gratification and sublimate or repress erotic needs. This close, exclusive, preoedipal mother-child relationship first develops dependency in a son, creating a motivational basis for early learning and a foundation for dependency on others. When a mother "rejects" her son or pushes him to be more independent, the son carries his still powerful dependence with him, creating in him both a general need to please and conform outside of the relationship to the mother herself and a strong assertion of independence. The isolated, husband-absent mother thus helps to create in her son a pseudo-independence masking real dependence, and a generalized sense that he ought to "do well" rather than an orientation to specific goals. This generalized sense can then be *1 do not mean to suggest here that a psychological account gives a complete cx- eanation for the reproduction of workers. The main reason people go to work is cause they need to in order to live. The family creates the psychological foundations of acquiescence in work and of work skills. But even reinforced by schools and other Socializing institutions, it is clear that socialization for work never works well enough to prevent all resistance. ••Parsons and his colleagues talk of (he "mother-child" relationship. However, they focus on erotic, ocdipal attachment as motivating, and on the development of character traits which arc appropriate to masculine work capacity and not to feminine expressive roles. It is safe to conclude, therefore, that the child they have in mind is male. 188 The Reproduction of Mothering used to serve a variety of specific goals—goals not set by these men themselves. The oedipus complex in the contemporary family creates a " 'dialectical' relationship between dependency, on the one hand, independence and achievement on the other."37 In an earlier period of capitalist development, individual goals were important for more men. and entrepreneurial achievement as well as worker discipline had to be based more on inner moral direction and repression- Earlier family arrangements, where dependency was not so salient nor the mother-child bond so exclusive, produced this greater inner direction. Today, with the exception of a very few, individual goals have become increasingly superseded by the goals of complex organizations: "Goals can no longer !>e directly the individual's responsibility and cannot be directly specified to him as a preparation for his role."afl The contemporary family, with its manipulation of dependency in the mother-child relationship, and its production of generalized achievement orientation rather than inner goals and standards, produces personalities "that have become a Fully fluid resource for societal functions."39 Slater extends Parsons's discussion. People who start life with only one or two emotional objects, he argues, develop a "willingness to put all [their) emotional eggs in one symbolic basket."4 father plays it. The ineradicability of affective constellations manifests itself in later refietitions. helene deutsch. The Psychology of Women A woman is her mother That's the main thing ANN SEXTON. "Housewife" OEDIPAL ASYMMETRIES AND HETEROSEXUAL KNOTS' The same oedi pally produced ideology and psychology of male dominance, repression, and denial of dependence that propel men into the nonfamilial competitive work world place structural strains on marriage and family life. Because women mother, the development and meaning of heterosexual object-choice differ for men and women. The traditional psychoanalytic account of femininity and masculinity begins from this perception. In our society, marriage has assumed a larger and larger emotional weight, supposedly offsetting the strains 191 192 The Reproduction of Mothering of increasingly alienated and bureaucrat i zed work in the paid economy. It no longer has the economic and political basis it once had. and the family has collapsed in upon its psychological and personal functions as production, education, religion, and care for the sick and aged have left the home. In this context, the contradictions between women's and men's heterosexuality that result from women's performing mothering functions stand out clearly. According to psychoanalytic theory, heterosexual erotic orientation is a primary outcome of the oedipus complex for both sexes. Boys and girls differ in this, however. Boys retain one primary love object throughout their boyhood. For this reason, the development of masculine heterosexual object choice is relatively continuous: "In males the path of this development is straightforward, and the advance from the 'phallic" phase does not take place in consequence of a complicated 'wave of repression' but is based upon a ratification of that which already exists. . . ."* In theory, a boy resolves his oedipus complex by repressing his attachment to his mother. He is therefore read) in adulthood to Hnd a primary relationship with someone like his mother. When he does, the relationship is given meaning from its psychological reactivation of what was originally an intense and exclusive relationship—first an identity, then a "dual-unity," finally a two-person relationship. Things are not so simple for girls: "Psychoanalytic research discovered at the very outset that the development of the infantile libido to the normal heterosexual object-choice is in women rendered difficult by certain peculiar circumstances."3 These "peculiar circumstances" are universal facts of family organization. Because her first love object is a woman, a girl, in order to attain her proper heterosexual orientation, must transfer her primary object choice to her father and men. This creates asymmetry in the feminine and masculine oedipus complex, and difficulties in the development of female sexuality, given heterosexuality as a developmental goal. For girls, just as for boys, mothers are primary love objects. As a result, the structural inner object setting of female heterosexuality differs from that of males. When a girl's father does become an important primary person, it is in the context of a bisexual relational triangle. A girl's relation to him is emotionally in reaction to, interwoven and competing for primacy with, her relation to her mother. A girl usually turns to her father as an object of primary interest from the exclusivity of the relationship to her mother, but this Hbidinal turning to her father does not substitute for her attachment to her mother. Instead, a girl retains her preoedipal tie to her mother {an intense tie involved with issues of primary identification, primary Psychodynamics oj the Family 193 love, dependence, and separation) and builds oedipal attachments to both her mother and her father upon it. These attachments are characterized by eroticized demands for exclusivity, feelings of competition, and jealousy. She retains the internalized early relationship, including its implications for the nature of her definition of self, and internalizes these other relationships in addition to and not as replacements for it. For girls, then, there is no absolute change of object, nor exclusive attachment to their fathers. Moreover, a father's behavior and family role, and a girl's relationship to him, are crucial to the development of heterosexual orientation in her. But fathers are comparatively unavailable physically and emotionally. They are not present as much and are not primary caretakers, and their own training lor masculinity may have led them to deny emotionality. Because of the father's lack of availability to his daughter, and because of the intensity of the mother-daughter relationship in which she participates, girls tend not to make a total transferor affection to their fathers but to remain also involved with their mothers, and to oscillate emotionally between mother and lather. The implications of this are twofold. First, the nature of the heterosexual relationship differs for boys and girls. Most women emerge from their oedipus complex oriented to their father and men as primary erotic objects, but it is clear that men tend to remain emotionally secondary, or at most emotionally equal« compared to the primacy and exclusivity of an oedipal boy's emotional tie to his mother and women. Second, because the father is an additional important love object, who becomes important in the context of a relational triangle, the feminine inner object world is more complex than the masculine. This internal situation continues into adulthood and affects adult women's participation in relationships. Women, according to Deutsch. experience heterosexual relationships in a triangular context, in which men are not exclusive objects for them. The implication of her statement is confirmed by cross-cultural examination of family structure and relations between the sexes, which suggests that conjugal closeness is the exception and not the rule.* Because mother and father are not the same kind of parent, the nature and intensity of a child's relationship to them differ as does the relationship's degree of exclusiveness. Because children first experience the social and cognitive world as continuous with themselves and do not differentiate objects, their mother, as first caretaking figure, is not a separate person and has no separate interests. In addition, this lack of separateness is in the context of the infant's total dependence on its mother for physical and psychological survival. / 9-i The Reproduction of Mothering The internalized experience of self in the original mother-relation remains seductive and frightening: Unity was bliss, yet meant the loss of self and absolute dependence. By contrast, a child has always differentiated itself from its father and known him as a separate person with separate interests. And the child has never been totally dependent on him. Her father has not posed the original narcissistic threat (the threat to basic ego integrity and boundaries) nor provided the original narcissistic unity (the original experience of oneness) to a girl. Oedipal love for the mother, then, contains both a threat to selfhood and a promise of primal unity which love for the father never does. A girl's love for her father and women's attachment to men reflect all aspects of these asymmetries. Men cannot provide the kind of return to oneness that women can. Michael Balint argues that the return to the experience of primary love—-the possibility of regressing to the infantile stage of a sense of oneness, no reality testing, and a tranquil sense of well-being in which all needs are satisfied—is a main goal of adult sexual relationships: 'This primary tendency, I shall be loved always, everywhere, in every way, my whole body, my whole being—without any criticism, without the slightest effort on my part—is the final aim of all erotic striving."5 He implies, though, that women can fulfill this need better than men, because a sexual relationship with a woman reproduces the early situation more completely and is more completely a return to the mother. Thus, males in coitus come nearest to the experience of refusion with the mother—"The male comes nearest to achieving this regression during coitus: with his semen in reality, with his penis symbolically, with his whole self in phantasy."6 Women's participation here is dual. (Balint is presuming women's heterosexuality.) First, a woman identifies with the man penetrating her and thus experiences through identification refusion with a woman (mother). Second, she becomes the mother (phylogenetically the all-embracing sea, ontogenetically the womb). Thus, a woman in a heterosexual relationship cannot, like a man, recapture as herself her own experience ofmerging. She can do so only by identifying with someone who can, on the one hand, and by identifying with the person with whom she was merged on the other. The "regressive restitution" (Balint's term) which coitus brings, then, is not complete for a woman in the way that it is for a man. Freud speaks to the way that women seek to recapture their relationship with their mother in heterosexual relationships.7 He suggests that as women "change object" from mother to father, the mother remains their primary internal object, so that they often impose on their relation to their father, and later to men, the issues Psychodynamics of the Family 195 which preoccupy them in their internal relation to their mother. They look in relations to men for gratifications that they want from a woman. Freud points to the common clinical discovery of a woman who has apparently taken her father as a model for her choice of husband, but whose marriage in fact repeats the conflicts and feelings of her relationship with her mother. For instance, a woman who remains ambivalently dependent on her mother, or preoccupied internally with the question of whether she is separate or not, is likely to transfer this stance and sense of self to a relationship with her husband.8 Or she may identify herself as a part-object of her male partner, as an extension of her father and men, rather than an extension of her mother and women.* But children seek to escape from their mother as well as return to her. Fathers serve in part to break a daughter's primary unity with and dependence on her mother. For this and a number of other reasons, fathers and men are idealized.9 A girl's father provides a last ditch escape from maternal omnipotence, so a girl cannot risk driving him away. At the same time, occupying a position of distance and ideological authority in the family, a father may be a remote figure understood to a large extent through her mother's interpretation of his role. This makes the development of a relationship based on his real strengths and weaknesses difficult. Finally, the girl herself has not received the same kind of love from her mother as a boy has. Mothers experience daughters as one with themselves; their relationships to daughters are "narcissistic," while those with their sons are more "anaclitic." Thus, a daughter looks to her father for a sense of separateness and for the same confirmation of her specialness that her brother receives from her mother. She (and the woman she becomes) is willing to deny her father's limitations (and those of her lover or husband) as long as she feels loved.10 She is more able to do this because his distance means that she does not really know him. The relationship, then, because of the father's distance and importance to her, occurs largely as fantasy and idealization, and lacks the grounded reality which a boy's relation to his mother has. These differences in the experience of self in relation to father and mother are reinforced by the different stages at which boys and girls are likely to enter the oedipal situation. Girls remain longer in the preoedipal relationship, enter the oedipus situation later than boys, and their modes of oedipal resolution differ. Bibring, Slater, •This is obviously only one side of the psychological matter. Chasseguet-Smirgel. who points this out. notes that men also gain satisfaction and security from turning their all-powerful mother into a part-object attachment. í 96 The Reproduction of Molhering and John Whiting have suggested that in the absence of men, a mother sexualizes her relationship with her son early, so that "oedi-pal" issues of sexual attraction and connection, competition and jealousy, become fused with "preoedipal" issues of primary love and oneness. By contrast, since the girl's relationship CO her father develops later, her sense of self is more firmly established. If oedipal and preoedipal issues are fused for her, this fusion is more likely to occur in relation to her mother, and not to her father. Because her sense of self is firmer, and because oedipal love for her father is not so threatening, a girl does not "resolve" her oedipus complex to the same extent as a boy. This means that she grows up more concerned with both internalized and external object-relationships, while men tend to repress their oedipal needs for love and relationship. At the same tíme. men often become intolerant and disparaging of those who can express needs for love, as they attempt to deny their own needs.*" Men defend themselves against the threat posed by love, but needs for love do not disappear through repression. Their training for masculinity and repression of affective relational needs, and their primarily nonemotional and impersonal relationships in the public world make deep primary relationships with other men hard to come by." Given this, it is not surprising that men tend to find themselves in heterosexual relationships. These relationships to women derive a large part of their meaning and dynamics from the men's relation lo their mothers. But the maternal treatment described by Bibring, Slater, and Whiting creates relational problems in sons. When a boy's mother has treated him as an extension of herself and at the same time as a sexual object, he learns to use his masculinity and possession of a penis as a narcissistic defense. In adulthood, he will look to relationships with women for narcissistic-phallic reassurance rather than for mutual affirmation and love. Because their sexuali/.ed preoedipal attachment was encouraged, while their oedipal-genital wishes were thwarted and threatened with punishment, men may defensively invest more exclusively in the instinctual gratifications to be gained in a sexual relationship in order to avoid risking rejection of love. Women have not repressed affective needs- They still want love and narcissistic confirmation and may be willing lo put up with limitations in their masculine lover or husband in exchange for evidence •Chasseguei-Smirgel argues iltai what Freud and Brunswick call the boy's "normal contempt" lor women, and consider a standard outcome of the oedipus complex, is a parhologital and defensive reaction 10 the sense of inescapable maternal omnipotence rather than a direct outcome of genital differences. Psyehodynamia of the Family J 91 of caring and love. This can lead to the denial of more immediately felt aggressive and erotic drives. Chasseguet-Smirgel suggests that a strong sexuality requires the expression of aggressive, demanding impulses fused with erotic love impulses and idealization. To the extent that women feel conflict and fear punishment especially over all impulses they define as aggressive, their sexuality suffers.* As a result of the social organization of parenting, then, men operate on two levels in women's psyche. On one level, they arc emotionally secondary and not exclusively loved—are not primary love objects like mothers. On another, they are idealized and experienced as needed, but are unable either to express their own emotional needs or respond to those of women. As Grunberger puts it, "The tragedy t)f this situation is that the person who could give [a woman] this confirmation, her sexual partner, is precisely the one who, as we have just seen, has come to despise narcissistic needs in an effort to disengage himself from them."13 This situation is illuminated by sociological and clinical findings. Conventional wisdom has it, and much of our everyday observation confirms, that women are the romantic ones in our society, the ones for whom love, marriage, and relationships matter. However, several studies point out that men love and fall in love romantically, women sensibly and rationally.'4 Most of these studies argue that in the current situation, where women are economically dependent on men. women must make rational calculations for the provision of themselves and their (future) children. This view suggests that women's apparent romanticism is an emotional and ideological response to their very real economic dependence. On the societal level, especially given economic inequity, men are exceedingly important to women. The recent tendency for women to initiate divorce and separation more than men as income becomes more available to them (and as the feminist movement begins to remove the stigma of "divorcee") further confirms this. Adult women arc objectively dependent on men economically, just as in childhood girls are objectively dependent on their fathers to escape from maternal domination. Their developed ability to romanticize rational decisions (to ignore or even idealize the failings of their father and men because of their dependence) stands women in good stead in this adult situation. •She suggests that this reaction, in which aggressive and erotic drives opposed to idealization arc counter-cathecied and repressed, bet'er explains feminine frigidiiy and whai Marie Bon aparte and Deutsch consider to be the "normaľ' feminine spiritual-i/aiion of sex. Bonaparte explains these in terms of women's lesser libtdinal energy, and Deutsch explains them as constitutional inhibition. 198 The Reproduction of Molhering There is another side to this situation, however. Women have acquired a real capacity for rationality and distance in heterosexual relationships, qualities built into their earliest relationship with a man. Direct evidence for the psychological primacy of this latter stance comes from findings about the experience of loss itself. George Goe-thals reports the clinical finding that men's loss of at least the first adult relationship "throws them into a turmoil and a depression of the most extreme kind"15—a melancholic reaction to object-loss of the type Freud describes in "Mourning and Melancholia"—in which they withdraw and are unable to look elsewhere for new relationships. He implies, by contrast, that first adult loss may not result in as severe a depression for a woman, and claims that his women patients did not withdraw to the same extent and were more able to look elsewhere for new relationships. Zick Rubin reports similar findings."1 The women he studied more frequently broke up relationships, and the men, whether or not they initiated the break-up, were more depressed and lonely afterward. Jessie Bernard, discussing older people, reports that the frequency of psychological distress, death, and suicide is much higher among recently widowed men than women, and indicates that the same difference can be found in a comparison of divorced men and women.'7 These studies imply that women have other resources and a certain distance from their relationships to men. My account stresses that women have a richer, ongoing inner world to fall back on, and that the men in their lives do not represent the intensity and exclusivity that women represent to men. Externally, they also retain and develop more relationships. It seems that, developmental!)', men do not become as emotionally important to women as women do to men. Because women care for children, then, heterosexual symbiosis has a different "meaning" for men and women. Freud originally noted that "a man's love and a woman's are a phase apart psychologically."18 He and psychoanalytic thinkers after him point to ways in which women and men, though usually looking for intimacy with each other, do not fulfill each other's needs because of the social organization of parenting. Differences in. female and male oedipal experiences, all growing out of women's mothering, create this situation. Girls enter adulthood with a complex layering of affective ties and a rich, ongoing inner object world. Boys have a simpler oedipal situation and more direct affective relationships, and this situation is repressed in a way that the girl's is not. The mother remains a primary internal object to the girl, so that heterosexual relationships are on the model of a nonexclusive, second relationship for her, whereas for the boy they recreate an exclusive, primary relationship. Psychodynamks of Ike Family 199 As a result of being parented by a woman, both sexes look for a return to this emotional and physical union. A man achieves this directly through the heterosexual bond, which replicates the early mother-infant exclusivity. He is supported in this endeavor by women, who, through their own development, have remained open to relational needs, have retained an ongoing inner affective life, and have learned to deny the limitations of masculine lovers for both psychological and practical reasons. Men both look for and fear exclusivity. Throughout their development, they have tended to repress their affective relational needs, and to develop ties based more on categorical and abstract role expectations, particularly with other males. They are likely to participate in an intimate heterosexual relationship with the ambivalence created by an intensity which one both wants and fears—demanding from women what men are at the same time afraid of receiving. As a result of being parented by a woman and growing up heterosexual, women have different and more complex relational needs in which an exclusive relationship to a man is not enough. As noted previously, this is because women situate themselves psychologically as part of a relational triangle in which their father and men are emotionally secondary or, at most, equal to their mother and women. In addition, the relation to the man itself has difficulties. Idealization, growing out of a girl's relation to her father, involves denial of real feelings and to a certain extent an unreal relationship to men. The contradictions in women's heterosexual relationships, though, are due as much to men's problems with intimacy as to outcomes of early childhood relationships. Men grow up rejecting their own needs for love, and therefore find k difficult and threatening to meet women's emotional needs. As a result, they collude in maintaining distance from women. THE CYCLE COMPLETED: MOTHERS AND CHILDREN Families create children gendered, heterosexual, and ready to marry. But families organized around women's mothering and male dominance create incompatibilities in women's and men's relational needs. In particular, relationships to men are unlikely to provide for women satisfaction of the relational needs that their mothering by women and the social organization of gender have produced. The less men participate in the domestic sphere, and especially in parenting, the more this will be the case. Women try to fulfill their need to be loved, try to complete the 200 The Reproduction of Malhering relational triangle, and try to reexperience the sense of dual unity they had with their mother, which the heterosexual relationship tends to fulfill for men. This situation daily reinforces what women first experienced developmental!)' and intrapsychically in relation to men. While they are likely to become and remain erotically heterosexual, they are encouraged both by men's difficulties with love and by their own relational history with their mothers to look elsewhere for love and emotional gratification. One way that women fulfill these needs is through the creation and maintenance of important personal relations with other women. Cross-culturally, segregation by gender is the rule: Women tend io have closer personal ties with each other than men have, and to spend more time in the company of women than they do with men. In our society, there is some sociological evidence that women's friendships are affectively richer than men's.19 In other societies, and in most subcultures of our own, women remain involved with female relatives in adulthood.20 Deutsch suggests further that adult female relationships sometimes express a woman's psychological participation in the relational triangle. Some women, she suggests, always need a woman rival in their relationship to a man; others need a best friend with whom they share all confidences about their heterosexual relationships. These relationships are one way of resolving and recreating the mother-daughter bond and are an expression of women's general relational capacities and definition of self in relationship. However, deep affective relationships to women are hard to come by on a routine, daily, ongoing basis for many women. Lesbian relationships do tend to recreate mother-daughter emotions and connections,21 but most women are heterosexual. This heterosexual preference and taboos against homosexuality, in addition to objective economic dependence on men, make the option of primary sexual bonds with other women unlikely—though more prevalent in recent years. In an earlier period, women tended to remain physically close to their own mother and sisters after marriage, and could find relationships with other women in their daily work and community. The development of industrial capitalism, however—and the increasingly physically isolated nuclear family it has produced—has made these primary relationships more rare and has turned women (and men) increasingly and exclusively to conjugal family relationships for emotional support and love.82 There is a second alternative, made all the more significant by the elimination of the first, which also builds both upon the nature of women's self-definition in a heterosexual relationship and upon the primary mother-child bond. As Deutsch makes clear, women's psyche Psychodynamks of the Family 201 consists in a layering of relational constellations. The preoedipal mother-child relation and the oedipal triangle have lasted until late in a woman's childhood, in fact throughout her development. To the extent that relations with a man gain significance for a woman, this experience is incomplete. Given the triangular situation and emotional asymmetry of her own parenting, a woman's relation to a man requires on the level of psychic structure a third person, since it was originally established in a triangle. A man's relation to women does not. His relation to his mother was originally established first as an identity, then as a dual unity, then as a two-person relationship, before his father ever entered the picture. On the level of psychic structure, then, a child completes the relational triangle for a woman. Having a child, and experiencing her relation to a man in this context, enables her to reimpose intrapsychic relational structure on the social world, while at the same time resolving the generational component of her oedipus complex as she takes a new place in the triangle—-a maternal place in relation to her own child. The mother-child relationship also recreates an even more basic relational constellation. The exclusive symbiotic mother-child relationship of a mother's own infancy reappears, a relationship which all people who have been mothered want basically to recreate. This contrasts to the situation of a man. A man often wants a child through his role-based, positional identification with his father, or his primary or personal identification with his mother. Similarly, a woman has been involved in relational identification processes with her mother, which include identifying with a mother who has come to stand to both sexes as someone with unique capacities for mothering. Yet on a less conscious, object-relational level, having a child recreates the desired mother-child exclusivity for a woman and interrupts it for a man, just as the man's father intruded into his relation to his mother. Accordingly, as Benedek, Zilboorg, and Bakan suggest, men often feel extremely jealous toward children.* These differences hold also on the level of sexual and biological fantasy and symbolism. A woman, as I have suggested, cannot return to the mother in coitus as directly as can a man. Symbolically her identification with the man can help. However, a much more straightforward symbolic return occurs through her identification with the child who is in her womb: "Fer-enczi's 'maternal regression' is realized for the woman in equating coitus with the situation of sucking. The last act of this regression (return into the uterus) which the man accomplishes by the act of "This is not io deny the conflicts and resentments which women may feel about their children. 202 The Reproduction of Mothering introjection in coitus, is realized by (he woman in pregnancy in the complete identification between mother and child."*3 For all these reasons, it seems psychologically logical to a woman to turn her marriage into a family, and to be more involved with these children (this child) than her husband. By doing so. she recreates for herself the exclusive intense primary «nit which a heterosexual relationship tends to recreate for men. She recreates also her internalized asymmetrical relational triangle. These relational issues and needs predate and underlie her identifications, and come out of normal family structure regardless of explicit role training. Usually, however, this training intensifies their effects. In mothering, a woman acts also on her personal identification with a mother who parents and her own training for women's role. This account indicates a larger structural issue regarding the way in which a woman's relation to her children recreates the psychic situation of the relationship to her mother. This relationship is recreated on two levels: most deeply and unconsciously, that of the primary mother-infant tie: and upon this, the relationship of the bisexual triangle. Because the primary mother-infant unit is exclusive, and because oscillation in the bisexual triangle includes a constant pull back to the mother attachment, there may be a psychological contradiction for a woman between interest in and commitment 10 children and that to men. Insofar as a woman experiences her relationship to her child on the level of intrapsychic structure as exclusive, her relationship to a man may therefore be superfluous. Freud points tentatively to this (to him, unwelcome) situation, in contrasting men's and women's object-love. In his essay "On Narcissism." he claims that "complete object-love of the attachment type is. properly speaking, characteristic of the male."2* Women, by contrast, tend to love narcissistically—on one level, to want to be loved or to be largely self-sufficient; on another, to love someone as an extension of their self rather than a differentiated object. He implies here thai the necessary mode of relating to infants is the normal way women love. Yet he also claims that women do attain true object-love, but only in relation to their children—who are both part of them and separate. Freud's stance here seems to be that of the excluded man viewing women's potential psychological self-sufficiency vis-ä-vis men-This situation may be the basis of the early psychoanalytic claim that women are more narcissistic than men, since clinically it is clear that men have just as many and as serious problems of fundamental ob-jeci-relatedness as do women.25 Clinical accounts reveal this contradiction between male-female and mother-child love. Fliess and Deutsch point to the extreme case Psychodynamks of the Family 203 where children are an exclusively mother-daughter affair.26 Some women fantasize giving their mother a baby, or even having one from her. These are often teenage girls with extreme problems of attachment and separation in relation 10 their mothers, whose fathers were more or less irrelevant in the home. Often a girl expresses this fantasy through either not knowing who the father of her baby is, or knowing and not caring. Her main object is to take her baby home to her mother. Deutsch points out that in women's fantasies and dreams, sexuality and erotism arc often opposed to motherhood and reproduction.27 She reports clinical and literary cases of women who choose either sexualiiy or motherhood exclusively, mothers for whom sexual satisfactions become insignificant, women with parthenogenic fantasies. Benedek and Winnicott observe that the experience of pregnancy, and the anticipation of motherhood, often entail a withdrawal of a woman's interest from other primary commitments to her own body and developing child. As Benedek puts it. "The woman's interest shifts from extraverted activities to her body and its welfare. Expressed in psychodynamic terms: the libido is withdrawn from external, heterosexual objects, becomes concentrated upon the self."28 This libidinal shift may continue after birth. Psychological and li-bidinal gratifications from the nursing relationship may substitute for psychological and libidinal gratifications formerlv found in heterosexual involvements.19 The clinical findings and theoretical claims of Bakan, Benedek, and Zilboorg concerning men's jealousy of their children confirm this as a possibility. On the level of the relational triangle also, there can be a contradiction between women's interest in children and in men. This is evident in Freud's suggestion thai women oscillate psychologically between a preoedipal and oedipal stance (he says between periods of "masculinity" and "femininity") and that women's and men's love is a phase apart psychologically (that a woman is more likelv to love her son than her husband). Deutsch points out that a man may or may not be psychologically necessary or desirable to the mother-child exclusivity. When she is orienied to the man, a woman's fantasy of having children is "I want a child by him, with him"; when men are emotionally in the background, it is "I want a child."30 Women come to want and need primary relationships 10 children. These wants and needs result from wanting intense primary relationships, which men tend not to provide both because of their place in women's oedipal constellation and because of their difficulties with intimacy. Women's desires for intense primary relationships tend not to be with 01 her women, both because of internal and external taboos 204 Tlie Reproduction of Mothering on homosexuality, and because of women's isolation from iheir primary female kin (especially mothers) and other women. As they develop these wants and needs, women also develop the capacities for participating in parent-child relationships. They develop capacities for mothering. Because of the structural situation of parenting, women remain in a primary, preoedipal relationship with their mother longer than men. They do not feel the need to repress or cut off the capacity for experiencing the primary identification and primary love which are the basis of parental empathy. Also, their development and oedipal resolution do not require the ego defense against either regression or relation which characterizes masculine development. Women also tend to remain bound up in preoedipal issues in relation to their own mother, so that they in fact have some unconscious investment in reactivating them. When they have a child, they are more liable than a man to do so. In each critical period of their child's development, the parent's own development conflicts and experiences of that period affect their attitudes and behavior.31 The preoedipal relational stance, latent in women's normal relationship to the world and experience of self, is activated in their coming to care for an infant, encouraging their empathic identification with this infant which is the basis of maternal care. Mothering, moreover, involves a double identification for women. both as mother and as child. The whole preoedipal relationship has been internalized and perpetuated in a more ongoing way for women than for men. Women take both parts in it. Women have capacities for primary identification with their child through regression to primary love and empathy. Through their mother identification, they have ego capacities and the sense of responsibility which go into caring for children. In addition, women have an investment in mothering in order to make reparation to their own mother (or to get back at her). Throughout their development, moreover, women have been building layers of identification with their mothers upon the primary internalized mother-child relationship.32 Women develop capacities for mothering from their object-relational stance. This stance grows out of the special nature and length of their preoedipal relationship to their mother; the nonabsolute repression of oedipal relationships; and their general ongoing mother-daughter preoccupation as they are growing up. It also develops because they have not formed the same defenses against relationships as men. Related to this, they develop wants and needs to be mothers from their oedipal experience and the contradictions in heterosexual love that result. Psychodynamics of the Family 205 The wants and needs which lead women to become mothers put them in situations where their mothering capacities can be expressed. At the same time, women remain in conflict with their internal mother and often their real mother as well. The preoccupation with issues of separation and primary identification, the ability to recall their early relationship to their mother—precisely those capacities which enable mothering—are also those which may lead to over-identification and pseudoempathy based on maternal projection raiher than any real perception or understanding of their infant's needs.33 Similarly, the need for primary relationships becomes more prominent and weighted as relationships to other women become less possible and as father/husband absence grows. Though women come to mother, and to be mothers, the very capacities and commitments for mothering can be in contradiction one with the other and within themselves. Capacities which enable mothering are also precisely those which can make mothering problematic. GENDER PERSONALITY AND THE REPRODUCTION OF MOTHERING In spile of the apparently close tie between women's capacities for childbearing and lactation on the one hand and their responsibilities for child care on the other, and in spite of the probable prehistoric convenience (and perhaps survival necessity) of a sexual division of labor in which women mothered, biolog)' and instinct do not provide adequate explanations for how women come to mother. Women's mothering as a feature of social structure requires an explanation in terms of social structure. Conventional feminist and social psychological explanations for the genesis of gender roles—girls and boys are "taught" appropriate behaviors and "learn" appropriate feelings— are insufficient both empirically and methodologically to account for how women become mothers. Methodologically, socialization theories rely inappropriately on individual intention. Ongoing social structures include the means for their own reproduction—in the regularized repetition of social processes, in the perpetuation of conditions which require members' participation, in the genesis of legitimating ideologies and instititutions, and in the psychological as well as physical reproduction of people to perform necessary roles. Accounts of socialization help to explain the perpetuation of ideologies about gender roles. However, notions of appropriate behavior, like coercion, cannot in themselves produce parenting. Psychological capacities and a particular object-relational 206 The Reproduction of Mothering stance are central and definitional to parenting in a way that they are not to many other roles and activities. Women's mothering includes the capacities for its own reproduction. This reproduction consists in the production of women with, and men without, the particular psychological capacities and stance which go into primary parenting. Psychoanalytic theory provides us with a theory of social reproduction that explains major features of personality development and the development of psychic structure, and the differential development of gender personality in particular. Psychoanalysts argue that personality both results from and consists in the ways a child appropriates, internalizes, and organizes early experiences in their family—from the fantasies they have, the defenses they use, the ways they channel and redirect drives in this object-relational context. A person subsequently imposes this intrapsychic structure, and the fantasies, defenses, and relational modes and preoccupations which go with it, onto external social situations. This reexternalization (or mutual reexternalization) is a major constituting feature of social and interpersonal situations themselves. Psychoanalysis, however, has not had an adequate theory of the reproduction of mothering. Because of the ideological assumption that anatomy is destiny, and that women's destiny includes primary parenting, the ontogenesis of women's mothering has been largely ignored, even while the genesis of a wide variety of related disturbances and problems has been accorded widespread clinical attention. Most psychoanalysts agree that the basis for parenting is laid for both genders in the early relationship to a primary caretaker. Beyond that, in order to explain why women mother, they tend to rely on vague notions of a girl's subsequent identification with her mother, which makes her and not her brother a primary parent, or on an unspecified and uninvestigated innate femaleness in girls, or on logical leaps from lactation or early vaginal sensations to caretaking abilities and commitments. The psychoanalytic account of male and female development, when reinterpreted, gives us a developmental theory of the reproduction of women's mothering. Women's mothering reproduces itself through differing object-relational experiences and differing psychic outcomes in women and men. As a result of having been parented by a woman, women are more likely than men to seek to be mothers, that is, to relocate themselves in a primary mother-child relationship, to get gratification from the mothering relationship, and to have psychological and relational capacities for mothering. The early relation to a primary caretaker provides in children of both genders both the basic capacity to participate in a relationship Psychodynamics of the Family 207 with the features of the early parent-child one. and the desire to create this intimacy. However, because women mother, the early experience and preoedipal relationship differ for boys and girls. Girls retain more concern with early childhood issues in relation to their mother, and a sense of self involved with these issues. Their attachments therefore retain more preoedipal aspects. The greater length and different nature of their preoedipal experience, and their continuing preoccupation with the issues of this period, mean that women's sense of self is continuous with others and that they retain capacities for primary identification, both of which enable them to experience the empathy and lack of reality sense needed by a cared-for infant. In men, these qualities have been curtailed, both because they are early treated as an opposite by their mother and because their later attachment to her must be repressed. The relational basis for mothering is thus extended in women, and inhibited »n men, who experience themselves as more separate and distinct from others. The different structure of the feminine and masculine oedipal triangle and process of oedipal experience that results from women's mothering contributes further to gender personality differentiation and the reproduction of women's mothering. As a result of this experience, women's inner object world, and the affects and issues associated with it, are more actively sustained and more complex than men's. This means that women define and experience themselves re-lationally. Their heterosexual orientation is always in internal dialogue with both oedipal and preoedipal mother-child relational issues. Thus, women's heterosexuality is triangular and requires a third person—a child—for its structural and emotional completion. For men, by contrast, the heterosexual relationship alone recreates the early bond to their mother; a child interrupts it. Men, moreover, do not define themselves in relationship and have come to suppress relational capacities and repress relational needs. This prepares them to participate in the affect-denying world of alienated work, but not to fulfill women's needs for intimacy and primary relationships. The oedipus complex, as it emerges from the asymmetrical organisation of parenting, secures a psychological taboo on parent-child incest and pushes boys and girls in the direction of extra fa m i lial heterosexual relationships. This is one step toward the reproduction of parenting. The creation and maintenance of the incest taboo and of heterosexuality in girls and boys are different, however. For boys, superego formation and identification with their father, rewarded by the superiority of masculinity, maintain the taboo on incest with their mother, while heterosexual orientation continues from their earliest love relation with her. For girls, creating them as heterosexual in the 208 The Reproduction of Mothering first place maintains the taboo. However, women's heterosexuality is not so exclusive as men's. This makes it easier for them to accept or seek a male substitute for their fathers. At the same time, in a male-dominant society, women's exclusive emotional heterosexuality is not so necessary, nor is her repression of love for her father. Men are more likely to initiate relationships, and women's economic dependence on men pushes them anyway into heterosexual marriage. Male dominance in heterosexual couples and marriage solves the problem of women's lack of heterosexual commitment and lack of satisfaction by making women more reactive in the sexual bonding process. At the same time, contradictions in heterosexuality help to perpetuate families and parenting by ensuring that women will seek relations to children and will not find heterosexual relationships alone satisfactory. Thus, men's lack of emotional availability and women's less exclusive heterosexual commitment help ensure women's mothering. Women's mothering, then, produces psychological self-definition and capacities appropriate to mothering in women, and curtails and inhibits these capacities and this self-definition in men. The early experience of being cared for by a woman produces a fundamental structure of expectations in women and men concerning mothers' lack of separate interests from their infants and total concern for their infants' welfare. Daughters grow up identifying with these mothers, about whom they have such expectations. This set of expectations is generalized to the assumption that women naturally take care of children of all ages and the belief that women's "maternal" qualities can and should be extended to the nonmothering work that they do. All these results of women's mothering have ensured that, women will mother infants and will take continuing responsibility for children. The reproduction of women's mothering is the basis for the reproduction of women's location and responsibilities in the domestic sphere. This mothering, and its generalization to women's structural location in the domestic sphere, links the contemporary social organization of gender and social organization of production and contributes to the reproduction of each. That women mother is a fundamental organizational feature of the sex-gender system: It is basic to the sexual division of labor and generates a psychology and ideology of male dominance as well as an ideology about women's capacities and nature. Women, as wives and mothers, contribute as well to the daily and generational reproduction, both physical and psychological, of male workers and thus to the reproduction of capitalist production. Women's mothering also reproduces the family as it is constituted Psychodynamies of the Family 209 in male-dominant society. The sexual and familial division of labor in which women mother creates a sexual division of psychic organization and orientation. It produces socially gendered women and men who enter into asymmetrical heterosexual relationships; it produces men who react to. fear, and act superior to women, and who put most of their energies into the nonfamilial work world and do not parent. Finally, it produces women who turn their energies toward nurturing and caring for children—in turn reproducing the sexual and familial division of labor in which women mother. Social reproduction is thus asymmetrical. Women in their domestic role reproduce men and children physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Women in their domestic role as houseworkers reconstitute themselves physically on a daily basis and reproduce themselves as mothers, emotionally and psychologically, in the next generation. They thus contribute to the perpetuation of their own social roles and position in the hierarchy of gender. Institutionalized features of family structure and the social relations of reproduction reproduce themselves. A psychoanalytic investigation shows that women's mothering capacities and commitments, and the general psychological capacities and wants which are the basis of women's emotion work, are built develop mem all y into feminine personality. Because women are themselves mothered by women, they grow up with the relational capacities and needs, and psychological definition of self-in-relationship, which commits them to mothering. Men, because they are mothered by women, do not. Women mother daughters who, when they become women, mother. 236 Notes to Pages 145-151 20. Freud. 1933, New Introductory Lectures, p. 132. íi. Brunswick, 1940. "The Preoedipal Pliase." p. «39 (my italics). 22. Karl Abraham, 1920, "Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex," p. 132 (my italics). 23. Ibid., p. 129. 24. Freud. 1925. ""Some Psychical Consequences." p. 253. 25. Schäfer. 1974. "Problems," p. 463. 26. Ibid., pp. 267-268. 27. Freud. 1923fr. "The Infantile Genital Organization (An Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality)," SE, vol. 19. p. 142. 28. Freud, 1933, Neu Introductory Lectures, p. 65. 29. Helene Deutsch, 1925. "The Psychology of Woman in Relation to the Functions of Reproduction," in Fliess, ed.. The Psychoanalytic Reader, p. 168. 30. Freud, 1933, New Introductory Lectures, p. 118. 31. Brunswick, 1940. "The Preoedipal Phase," p. 233. 32. Freud, 1931. "Female Sexuality." p. 228. 33. Freud, 19236, "The Infantile Genital," p. 145. 34. Brunswick, 1940. "The Preoedipal Phase," p. 234. 35. Freud, 19236, "The Infantile Genital," p. 145. 36. Freud, 1933, New Introductory Lectures, p. 128-129. 37. Homey, 192ti, "The Flight from Womanhood." p. 65. 38. Ibid.. p. 60. 39. Horney, 1933. "The Denial of ihc Vagina." p. 149. 40. See Roben Stolici. 1972, "The Bedrock of Masculinity and Femininity: Bi-sexuality," Archives of General Psychiatry, 26. pp. 207-212. 1973, "Overview: The Impact of New Advances in Sex Research on Psych oanalytk Theory," American Jounml «/Psychiatry, 130, #3, pp. 241-351. and 1974, "Facts and Fancies: An Examination of Freud's Concept ol Bisexuality." in Strouse. ed.. Women and Analysis; and Money and Ehrhaidi, 1972, Man and Woman. 41. Sec. for example, Mitchell. 1974, Psychoanalysis and Feminism; Burncss E. Moore. 1976, "Freud and Female Sexuality: A Current View," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 57. #3. pp. 287-300. 42. Horney, 1933. "The Denial of the Vagina," p. 160. 43. Freud, 1931. "Female Sexuality," p. 2281 cited in Janine Chasscguct-Swirgcl, 1976, "Freud and Female Sexuality: The Consideration of Some Blind Spots in the Exploration of the 'Dark Ointment,' " Inlernatiaiutl Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 571 *3* pp. 275-286. See also Chasseguet-Smirgel. 1964, "Introduction" 10 Female Sexuality. 44. Freud, »909, "Analysis ofa Phobia." p. 95. cited in ChasNcguci-Smirgcl, '97*>-"Freud and Female Sexuality." 45. Sec. for example, Kcsienbcrg, 1956a, "On the Development," 1956ft. "Vicissitudes of Female Sexuality." Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 4. pp. 453-476. and 1968, "Outside and Inside": Phyllis Greenacre, 1950. "Special Problems of Early Female Sexual Development," Psychoanalytic Study of tlie Child, 5, pp. 12*-138; MarjorkC. Barncti. 1968. " 'I CanY Versus 'He Won't': Further Considerations of the Psychical Consequences of the Anatomic and Physiological Differences Between the Sexes," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 16, pp. 588-600; Chasseguct-Smirgel. 1964, "Feminine Guilt." and 1976. "Freud and Female Sexuality." 46. Sec Robert Siollcr, 1964. "A Contribution to the Study of Gender Identity," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 45, pp. 220-226, 1965. "The Sense of Malencss." Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 34, pp. 207-218. 1972, "The Bedrock." 1973, "Overview." and 1974. "Facts and Fancies"; Money and Ehrhardl. iq^S,Man and Woman; and Kolilbcrg. 1966, "A Cogniiivc-Developmcnial Analysis." 47. Freud, 1931. "Female Sexuality," p. 230. 48. See Roiphe. »968, "On an Early Genital Phase": Eleanor Galenson, 197'. "A Consideration of the Nature of Thought in Childhood Play." in John B. McDeviu and Calvin F. Settlage. eds., Stpatation-lndividuation: Essays m Honor of Margaret S- Mahler; Eleanor Galenson and Herman Roiphe. 197t. "The Impact of Early Sexual Discovery Notes to Pages 15.2-173 237 on Mood, Defensive Organization, and $ymbo\\zzi\on," Psychoanalytk Study of the Child. 27- PP- i95-2|6; Roiphe and Galenson. 1973, "Object Loss": Roiphe and Galenson, 1975, "Some Observations on Transitional Object and Infantile Fetish,"Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 44. #2, pp. 206-231; Greenacre. 1968. "Perversions." 49. For the most extreme statement of this position, sec Abraham, 1920. "Manifestations." 50. Freud. 1937. "Analysis Terminable and Interminable." SE, vol. 23, p. 252. 51. Ibid., pp. 250-251. 52. Freud. 1933. New Introductory Lectures, p. 135. 53. Abraham, 1920, "Manifestations." p. 123. 54. Freud, 1924. "The Dissolution," p. 178. 55. See Schaler, 1974, "Problems." 56. Freud. 1933, New Introductory Lectures, p. 117. 57. Ibid.. p. 131. 58. Helene Deutsch, 1930, 'The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Ijfe of Women," in Fliess, ed., 7Yiŕ Psychoanalytic Reader: An Anthology of EsserUiat Papers uith Critical IntToduetiom, p. 205. 59. Ibid.. p. 207. 60. Charles Sarlin. 1963. "Feminine Identity," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 11, #4. p. 813. 61. Freud. 1933, New Introductory Lectures, p. 119. 62. Sarlin, 1963. "Feminine Identity," p, 794. On clitorideciomy and other operations against female anatomy in the nineteenth- and early tweniicih-century United States, see Bernard Barker-Benfield, 1973, "The Spermatic Economy of the Nineteenth Century," in Michael Cordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, and Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, 1973. Complaints and Disorders. CHAPTER 10 1. Freud. 1931, "Femak Sexuality," p. 238. 2. See Ernest Jones. 1961. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, and Paul Roazen, 1969, Brotlier Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk, 3. Freud, 1913, Totem and Taboo. 4. Gregory Zilboorg. 1944. "Masculine and Feminine: Some Biologiealand Cultural Aspects," in Miller, ed., Psychoanalysis and Women, pp. 96-131. 5. Benedck. 1959, "Parenthood as Developmental Phase." p. 412. 6. Zilboorg, 1944, "Masculine and Feminine." p. 123. 7. Bakan, 1966. The Duality of Human Existence, and i$ňfl. Disease, Pain and Sacrifice: Toward a Psychology of Suffering. 8. The importance of the uncertainty of paternity was First brought to my attention by Nancy Jay. n.d.. "The Uncertainty of Paternity." 9. Sec also Meyer Fortes. 1974, "The First Born," Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 15, pp. 81-104. 10. Harry Guntrip, 1961, Personality Structure. 11. Bibring, 1959, "Some Considerations,"and Bibringet al-, 1961, "A Study of the Psychological": Benedck, 1959. "Parenthood as Developmental Phase." 12. Loewald, 1962. "Internalization, Separation." 13. See Moore. 1976, "Freud and Female Sexuality." 14. The terms are H. V. Dicks's (1967, Marital Tensions). 15. See, for example. Deutsch. 1944, Psychology of Women. 16. Erik Erikson. 19640. "Womanhood and the Inner Space." CHAPTER 11 1. For a review of the literature which argues this, see Bilkr. 1971. Father, Child. See also Stollcr. 1965. "The Sense of Malencss." For a useful recent formulation, see Johnson, 1975, "Fathers, Mothers." 238 Notes to Pages 174-185 a. Sec Mead, 1949, Male and Female; Michelle Z. Rosaldo. 1974. "Woman. Culture, and Society"; Nancy Chodorow. 1971, "Beingand Doing," and 1974, "Family Structure and Feminine Personality," in Rosaldo and Lampherc, cds.. Woman, Culture and Society. pp. 43-66: Beatrice Whiting, ed.. 1963, Six Cultures; Beatrice B. Whiting and John W. M. Whiting. 1975, Children of Six Cultures; John Whiting. 1959. "Sorcery. Sin"; Burton and Whiting. 1961. "The Absent Father." 3. See Richard T. Roessler. 1971, "Masculine Differentiation and Feminine Con-sizncy," Adolescence, 6. #22. pp. 187-196: E. M. Bennett and L. R.Cohen. 1959, "Men and Women, Personality PauernsandConirasts,"6>n4'i« Psyclu/logy Monographs, 59, pp. 101-155; Johnson. 1963, "Sex Role Learning,*" and 1975. "Fathers. Mothers"; Stollcr, 1964, "A Contribution to the Study," 1965. "The Sense of Malettess." and 1968, "The Sense of Femalencss," Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 37, #i, pp. 42—55. 4. Sec Billcr, 1971. Father, Child. 5. Mitscherlich. 1963. Society Without the Father: Philip E. Slater. 1961. "Toward a Du a li stic Theory of Identification," Merrill- Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development, 7, #2, pp. 113—126; Robert F. Winch. 1962. Identification and I Li Familial Determinants: David B. Lynn, 1959. "A Note on Sex Differences." and 1962. "Sex Role and Parent." Ö.Johnson. 1975. "Fathers, Mothers," and Maccoby and Jacklin. 1974. The Psychology of Sex Differences, point this out. 7. D. B. Lynn, 1959, "A Note on Sex Differences," p. 130. 8. Sec Slater. 1961. "Toward a Dualistic Theory," and Johnson, 1975. "Fathers. Mothers." 9. This phrase is Arlic Hochschild*s. (See Arlie Russell Hochschild, 1975t. "1 he Sociology of Feeling and Emotion: Selected Possibilities." in Marcia Millman and Ros-abeth Moss Kanter, cds.. Another Voice, pp. 280-307.) She uses it to refer to the internal work women do to make their feelings accord with how they think they ought to feel. My usage here extends also to work for and upon other people's emotions. 10. See, for example. Johnson. 1975, "Fathers, Mothers"; Parsons and Bales. 1955. Family, Socialization; Deutsch. 1944. Psychology of Women. 11. Alice Balint, 1939. "Love for the Mother." 12. Rosaldo, 1974, "Woman, Culture and Society." 13. On these issues, sec Lynn, 1959, "A Note on Sex Differences." and 1962, "Sex Role and Parent"; Parsons, 194*, "Age and Sex"; Mitscherlich, 1963. Society Without the Father: Slater. 1968. The Glory of Hera: Mead. 1949, Male and Female. 14. Freud. 1925. "Some Psychical Consequences." p. »53. 15. Brunswick, 1940, "The Prcocdipal Phase." p. 246. 16. Ibid. 17. Freud, 1909, "Analysis of a Phobia." 18. Horney, 1932, "The Dread of Women." 19. Ibid., p. 351. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid.. p. 135. 22. Ibid., p. 136. 23. Ibid. 24. Slater (1968, 77» Cuyry of Hera, p. 19) points (his out. For cross-cultural comparisons of the relationship between family structure and men's preoccupation with masculinity, see, in addition to Slater, Whiting ct al., 1958. "The Function of Male Initiation Rites"; Whiiing, 1959, "Sorcery, Sin"; and Burton and Whiting. 1961, "The Absent Father." 25. On the relation of proletarianization to the decline of the oedipal father, sec Horkheimer. 1936, "Authority and the Family,"and Mitscherlich. 1963. Society Without the Father. 26. Bibring, 1953. "On the 'Passing of tlie Oedipus Complex.' " 27. Ibid.. p. 280. 28. Ibid.. p. 281. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. Notes to Pages 185-198 239 31. Ibid., p. 282. 32. Ibid. 33. But for discussions of ways that this accountability is actively maintained, sec Joseph H. Plcck and Jack Sawyer, 1974. Alfti and Masculinity, and Marc F. Fasteau. 1974, The Male Machine. 34. My formulation of ihc personálny requirements of the hierarchical firm follows Edwards, 1975, "The Social Relations of Production." 35. See Mclvin L. Kohn, 1969, Class and Conformity. 36. Frankfurt Institute. 1972. Aspects: Horkheimer. 1936. "Authority and the Family"; Mitscherlich, 1963, Society Without the Father; Parsons, 1964, Social Structure and Personality; Parsons and Bales. 1955. Family, Socialization; Slater, 1970. The Pursuit of Loneliness, and 1974. Earthwalk. 37. Talcoit Parsons with Winston White. 1961. "The Link Between Character and Society," in Social Structure and Personality, p. 218. 38. Ibid., p. 203. 39. Ibid.. p. 233. 40. Slater, 1974, Eartínoalk, p. 131. See also Slater, 1970. The Pursuit of Loneliness. 41. Horkheimer. 1936. "Authoriiy and the Family." p. 108. CHAPTER 12 1. Some of the material in this section appeared previously in Nancy Chodorow. 1976. "Oedipal Asymmetries and Heterosexual Knots." Social Problems, 23. #4. pp. 454-468. 2. Deutsch. 1925. "The Psychology of Woman," p. 165. 3. Ibid. 4. This claim comes from my reading of cihnographic literature and is confirmed by anihropologist Michelle Z. Rosaldo (personal communication). 5. Michael Balint. 1935, "Critical Notes on the Theory," p. 50. 6. Michael Balint, 1956a, "Perversions and Geniiality." in Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique, p. 141. Balint follows Sandor Fercnczi here (1984, -TfatUUM.' A Theory of Genitafity). 7. Freud. 1931. "Female Sexuality." 8. Sec Frcedman. 1961, "On Women Who Hate." for an excellent clinical account of this. 9. See Chasseguet-Smirgel. 1964, "Feminine Guilt," and Grunbcrger. 1964, "Outline for a Study." 10. For sociological confirmation of this, sec William M. Kephart, lylS?. "Some Correlates of Romantic Love,''Journal ofMarriage and the Family, 29, pp. 470-474' andZick Rubin. 1970. "Measurement of Romantic Love." Joumat of Personality and Social Psychology, 6. pp. 265-273. 11. Chasseguet-Smiigel. 1964, "Feminine Guilt." and Grunbcrger. 1964. "Outline for a Study." 1* Alan Booth (1972. "Sex and Social Participation." American Sociological Review, 37, pp. 183-193) rcporis that women's friendships in our society are affectively richer than men's. Along the same lines, Mtrra Komarovsky (1974, "Patterns of Self-Disclosure of Male Undergraduates, "Journal of Marriage and the Family, 36, #4, pp. 677-686) found that men students confided more in a special woman friend and thai they maintained a front of strength with men. Moreover, these men felt at a disadvantage vis-a-vis their woman confidante, because she tended to have a number of other persons in whom she could confide. 13. Crunberger. 1964, "Outline for a Study." p. 74. 14. See Martha Baum. 1971, "Love, Marriage and the Division of Labor," Sociological Inquiry, 4 \. #1, pp. 107-117. Arlie Russell Hochschild. 1975a. "Attending to. Codifying, and Managing Feelings": Kephart. 1967, "Some Correlates"; Zíck Rubin. 1975, "Loving and leaving." 15. Cocihals, 1973. "Symbiosis," p. 96. 240 Notes to Pages 198-216 16. Ziel; Kubin. 1975, "Loving and Leaving." 17. Jessie Bernard, 1972,7"^ Future of Marriage. 18. Freud, *$$%, New Introductory Lectures, p. 134. ig. Booth, 197s, "Sex and Social Participation"; this is a finding certainly confirmed by most writing Irom the men's liberation movement. so. See, for cross-cultural confirmation, most ethnographies and also Rosaldo and Lamphere, 1974, Woman, Culture and Society. For contemporary capitalist society, see Booih, 1972, "Sex and Social Participation," and for concrete illustration. Elizabeth Bott. 1957. Family and Social Network: Roles, Norms and External Relationships in Ordinary Urban Families', Herbert Gans, 1967, The Lenitiouners; Mirra Komarovsky, 1962, Blue-Collar Marriage; Carol B. Stack, 1974, All Our Km; Young and W'illmott. 1957, Family and Kinship. 21. Sec Deutsch, 1944, Psychology of Women: Charlotte Wolff, 1971, Love Between Women; Adrienne Rich, 1976. Of Woman Bom: Motherhood ás Experience and Institution. aa. For a contemporary account of exactly this transition, see Young and Wjllmoti, '957* Family "id Kinship. 23. Deutsch, 1925, "The Psychology of Woman," p. 171. 24. Freud, 1914, "On Narcissism," p. 88. 25. Sec Heinz Kohut, 1971, Analysis of Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. PsyclumnalytK Study of the Child, monograph #4. New York, International Universities Press; Otto Kcrnbcrg, 1975, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. 26. Flicss. 1 961. Ego and Body Ego; Deutsch. 1944. Psycliology of Women. 27. Deutsch, 1944, Psychology of Women. 28. Benedek, 1949. "Psychosomatic Implications," p. 645. 2g. On this, sec Alice Balint. 1939. "Love for the Mother": FUcss. 1961, Ego and Body Ego; Whiting ct al., 1958, "The Function of Male Initiation Rites": Newton, 1955, Maternal Emotion*, and 1973. "Interrelationships between Sexual Responsiveness." 30. Deutsch, 1944, Psychology of Women, p. 205. 31. Benedek, 1959. "Parenthood as Developmental Phase." 32. See Klein, 1937. "Love, Guilt and Reparation." Barbara Deck (personal communication) pointed out to me that Klein's interpretation of a woman's participation in mothering is homologous to that described by Fcrenczi and Balint in coitus. A woman's gratification in mothering comes from becoming her mother and from identifying with her mothered infant. Similarly, she is both the receiving mother (womb) and identifies wiih the male penetrating her in coitus. 33. The mothers I describe in Chapter 6 are cases in point. AFTERWORD 1. Bernard. 1974, The Future of Motherhood, citing Minium and Lambert, 1964. 2. See Friedl, 1975, Women and Men. 3. See Ortner, 1974, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" 4. U.S. Department of Labor, Employment Standards Administration. Women's Bureau. 1975 Handbook on Women Workers, Bulletin 297. Bibliography abelin. ERNEST i... 1971, "The Role of the Father in the Separation-Individuation Phase," pp. 229-252 in John B. McDevitt and Calvin F. Seulage, eds., Separation-Individuation: Essays in Hotior of Margaret S. Mahler. New York, International Universities Press. ABRAHAM, karu 1920, "Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex," pp. 109-135 m Jean Strouse, ed.. Women and Analysis. New York, Grossman Publishers, 1974. ----------, 1966, On Character and Libido Development. New York, W. W. Norton. ainsworth. máry salter, ig6g, "Object Relations, Dependency, and Attachment: A Theoretical Review of the Infant-Mother Relationship," Child Development, 40, #4, pp. 969-1025. ANCtL. klal'S, 1967, "On Symbiosis and Pscudosymbiosis." Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 15. #2, pp. 294-316. ----------. 1972, "The Role of the Internal Object and External Object in Object Relationships, Separation Anxiety, Object Constancy, and Symbiosis."/»-ternaliorial Journal oj Psycho-Analysis, 53, pp. 541-546. Aries, philippe, i960. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York, Vintage Books. bákán, DAvtD, 1966, The Duo/ily of Human Existence: Isolation and Communion in Western Man. Boston. Beacon Press. '■■'. 1968, Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice: Toivard a Psychology of Suffering. Boston, Beacon Press. BAUNT, Alice, 1939, "Love for the Mother and Mother-Love." pp. 91-108 in Michael Balint, ed.. Primary Love and Psycho-Analytic Technique. 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