Chodorow and Reproduction of Mothering
In, "A Room Of Her Own," the feminist novelist and author, Virginia Woolf demonstrated that one of the reasons why women writers were in overwhelmingly low numbers than their male counterparts was because of the lack of economic opportunity. (Woolf, 1991) Victorian perceptions also saddled women with the responsibilities of motherhood and domesticity. This took away the opportunity for women (except for a few) to truly come into their own. Nancy Chodorow, a preeminent social scientist addresses the issue. (Chodorow, 1999) She does not get caught up in the traditional feminist or socialization mindset. Even psychologists, Chodorow avers, have not pursued the matter at a higher granularity. All can agree that, explicitly or implicitly, women have been subjugated. Chodorow addresses the problem using psychoanalysis. She believes that the second-class status of women is associated with the issues of mothering, childbearing and childrearing -- aspects which women have been stuck with since the beginning of humanity. She calls this cycle, "reproduction of mothering."
She addresses this problem by proposing the idea that both girls and boys start out the same -- psychically (besides the obvious differences). Children of both sexes have "pre-oedipal" urges towards their mothers. Chodorow avers that because of taboos associated with incest, boys learn to suppress their Oedipal urges. Also, boys eventually automatically fit into the dominant structure in the male-female dyad in society. Girls, on the other hand, fit into "reproduction of mothering," which means a continued cycle of maternal instincts coming to the fore. This cycle is due to the fact that girls' Oedipal attachments manifest in a development of a sense of self from that attachment. Nancy Chodorow calls this a triangle between mother and daughter that is incomplete without a child forming the third vertex. The evolution of this attachment complex then extends to males in a male dominated society as a girl grows up. The transference of this sense of self is then continued with an attachment towards children. And thus, mothering is reproduced time and again across...
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