Summary and Discussion

The idea that men are more likely to think in terms of difference than women and to see the nature of gender difference in terms of superiority-inferiority could be the critical insight to bring together feminists who deemphasize gender difference with those who focus on and analyze the nature of the difference from a feminist perspective. Feminists who deemphasize gender difference are actually "woman-centered" in the sense that they see that an important virtue of women is that they are less likely to emphasize difference than men. Feminists who emphasize difference accept this larger truth that gender difference should not be as salient as it now is in male-female interaction but nevertheless want to examine the nature of the difference in order to create a woman-centered definition. In short, the insight that one key difference is that men emphasize difference can help integrate diverse positions with feminism.

In this chapter I give my own interpretation of the work of Dorothy Dinnerstein and some earlier work of Nancy Chodorow in connection with the hypothesis that women's early monopoly on child care accounts for male misogyny and male dominance itself. The arguments concerning the production of misogynist attitudes are as old as psychoanalysis, but generalizing these arguments to systems of male dominance is new. I interpret the fear and envy hypotheses as stressing how infantile dependency needs contribute to the primitive perception that women have great power to produce total bliss or total devastation. The more recent hypotheses concerning tenuous masculine identity stress boys' difficulties in "disidentifying" with the femaleness of mothers in order to identify as a male. Psychoanalytic explanations are useful because they take the

unconscious and nonrational into account and thus can explain the relative intractability of certain attitudes without claiming that these attitudes are biologically rooted and cannot be changed.

Evelyn Fox Keller and Jessica Benjamin are less concerned with using psychoanalytic ideas to explain male dominance as a system than with using them to explain the development of the attitude of domination itself. This fits in with critical theorists' concern with domination and attaches it to masculine propensities. Both Benjamin and Keller soft-pedal equal parenting as a viable cure for the infantile dilemmas they envision. This downplaying probably results from their fear that males would carry their dominating tendencies into mothering and reproduce the very system we seek to destroy. I share this fear and will develop the reasons for it in the chapters to follow.

The implications of all of these analyses at a psychological level is that we all need to become aware of the nonrational and unconscious bases of our behavior in order to "grow up." In one way or another all of the authors discussed imply that instead of sweeping male misogyny and propensities for domination under the table, we need to examine them not only to see that they run deep but also to hold them up to the light of criticism. I agree. Moreover, men and women are capable of taking thought and changing their own consciousness. It can happen, but it is important not just to give up old ways of seeing but to invent new ones, not out of whole cloth, but out of women's own intuitions. The new emphasis on interdependence and self in relationship seems headed in the right direction. This emphasis keeps the issue from being that of autonomy versus dependence, self-assertion versus passivity, domination versus submission, and so forth.

Consciousness also depends on and creates social structural arrangements. At another level all of the analyses I have been discussing are limited to the psychological consequences of women's being responsible for early child care. If analysis goes no further than the mother-child relationship, we are left with the impression that women's mothering is the problem. This is hardly the case.