Assessing Chodorow's Analysis

It is not clear why Chodorow feels she has to assume that the mother is heterosexual for her account to make sense. Bringing heterosexuality into a discussion of early gender formation may well be an unexamined legacy from psychoanalytic theory itself. Could one not just as well contend that mothers bond more closely with their daughters because they are also female and will also be capable of bearing children? Simply that the mother knows that the son cannot bear children could be sufficient to make her feel less close to him. By introducing heterosexuality into the argument, does Chodorow imply that lesbians are not gender-identified as females and thus would not feel a oneness with a female child? This certainly does not seem to be the case with lesbian feminists. Or is she saying that lesbians would be sexually attracted to their daughters and hence because of this would not bond closely with them? Chodorow admits to hedging of the issue of the mother's sexual orientation. If she had spelled out the implications of her assumptions about the mother's heterosexuality, she might have seen the degree to which psychoanalysis does confound gender and sexual orientation in ways that may be far more persuasive to males than to females. In my view, females are less likely to relate gender to heterosexuality than males.^[15] Certainly more and more theorists, including Chodorow, argue that gender identity and sexual orientations are not one and the same, but Chodorow in her own analysis does not focus directly on how they might and might not be related.

Even in her more recent writings, Chodorow still insists that the mechanism that produces a more relational orientation in females than males is that mothers bind their daughters to them more closely than sons, that mothers perhaps unconsciously identify more with their daughters than their sons.^[16] This view sometimes seems to blame individual mothers by implying that mothers somehow do not allow their daughters to individuate or that mothers impede their daughters' individuation.^[17] Chodorow's description of women as less individuated than men obscures the distinction I

have tried to maintain between relationality and dependency. Her description implies that mothers' treatment of daughters makes them both more dependent and more relational than males. I believe that both genders seek growth and move away from a relationship of dependency. In this movement toward greater autonomy the girl retains her relational tie to the mother while decreasing her dependency. The relational orientation that the girl gets from her mother should not be confused with the dependency on males that she may adopt first in relation to the father. Fathers may serve as a lever to help boys and girls extricate themselves from infantile dependency, but, as I will argue later, they do so at the price of encouraging dependency on themselves in their daughters.

Is a specific mechanism for explaining women's relational propensities, such as the close-bindingness of the mother, really necessary? In spite of the problem of circularity, it may be better from an empirical and theoretical standpoint to maintain simply that women's more relational orientation is transmitted through women's mothering. The specific mechanism Chodorow posits may be only one of many factors, all of which contribute to this outcome. The other specific factor that she brings in, the mother's heterosexuality, may be important for psychoanalytic theorists, but it seems unnecessary.^[18]

In the beginning of her book, Chodorow argues at some length that biological factors, such as differences in hormonal balance between males and females, are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain women's mothering. She argues specifically against Alice Rossi, who points out that women are hormonally predisposed (this is not the same as saying inevitably disposed ) to mother.^[19] To deny biological factors affecting gender is out of line with mainstream psychoanalytic thought, and as Janet Sayers points out, psychoanalytically oriented researchers have argued that the biological processes of pregnancy often "serve to revive in women their feelings about their relationships with their own mothers, feelings which subsequently link up with the way they relate to their own children."^[20] Chodorow could have used such arguments to back up her case that a mothers relationship with her daughter is the crucial variable in reproducing gender-differentiated personalities, but she did not.

Since the publication of her book, Chodorow has changed her mind a bit regarding biology; she now says that she has been con-

vinced by Rossi that she and other feminists "must be open to the investigation of biological variables and that those who argued or implied that such investigation is illegitimate were wrong." She goes on to say, however, that so far, it has not been shown that biology itself produces a personality type that wants to mother.^[21] I agree; biology never acts alone.

I believe that one reason for Chodorows overly energetic rejection of biological factors had to do with her earlier arguments that linked male misogyny to women's mothering. In 1978, she, along with most feminists, especially nonbiologists, tended to equate "biological" with "immutable" and felt that if one were to seek change, one had to deny biology. Her own account suggests, however, that women's mothering may be just as immutable for psychocultural reasons as it might have been thought to be for biological ones. Even if one has eliminated biology, it becomes difficult to argue for change, because of the universality of women's mothering. Chodorow has been accused of not being historically specific, but her answer is that women's mothering is not historically specific. It is universal in the sense that women, not men, have always been primarily responsible for the care of young children in all societies. Although the organization of parenting, and even the concept of parenting, including the role offathers, has undergone innumerable historical changes and has been greatly affected by economic and political arrangements, women's mothering has stayed the same in a fundamental way.

Most of Chodorow's book, The Reproduction of Mothering, is devoted to just this: how women's mothering is reproduced. Toward the end of her book, however, Chodorow shifts her argument from how women's mothering orientations are developed and turns to the question of gender inequality. At this point she returns to her argument in earlier works (discussed in Chapter 4), having to do with men's tendency to free themselves from making a female identification by devaluing women and overvaluing what men do.^[22] This then becomes the reason she recommends a change in mothering arrangements. Chodorow also makes the argument that women's mothering is related to male dominance because it tends to perpetuate women's association with the domestic sphere and men's association with the public sphere, which in turn gives males greater authority.

I am not convinced that women's mothering in itself associates

women with the domestic sphere. In hunting and gathering societies, women with children traveled widely and were not dependent on their husbands for food. What association there was between women and domesticity in these societies had more to do with women as wives (keepers of their husband's hearth) than with women as mothers.^[23] Chodorow, however, seems to picture the public-domestic distinction as a direct result of women's more relational orientation.

Chodorow depicts the public and domestic spheres as operating hierarchically; therefore, she comes close at times to collapsing the categories of gender differentiation and male domination.^[24] She states, however, that "kinship rules organize claims of men on domestic units and men dominate kinship."^[25] This formulation leaves room for arguing, as I do, that it is not women's mothering but marriage that places women, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, in domestic units. Chodorow does not say this, however, perhaps because she cannot quite bring herself to separate women's mothering from heterosexual marriage. If one does make this separation, it becomes clearer that marriage, not mothering per se, puts women in the domestic sphere—at least in modern Western cultures.

In my view the contribution of Chodorow's book does not lie in her last-minute reliance on male mothering as a "solution" to male dominance, but in her sustained development of an argument about gender differentiation in the preoedipal period. Chodorow's focus on this period coincides with my interest in separating the maternal from the heterosexual aspects of being a woman. Her analysis reinforces an emphasis on the maternal aspects, even though she seems to need to assume the mother s heterosexuality. Although Chodorow at times seems to blame mothers for making daughters dependent on them, her work begins to move toward a more positive view of women's relationality and women's mothering. Chodorow's analysis is, in this sense, woman-centered and contributes to the development of a more positive view of women as mothers, as opposed to an image of women as essentially appendages of men.

Moreover, I do not believe that Chodorow's suggestion that mothers tie girls more closely to them than boys should mean that mothers by their own actions create gender difference. Rather, the greater insight here is that the mother-daughter relationship forms

a basis for positive female bonding. For sons, breaking away from the mother forms the basis for male bonding. In the remainder of this chapter I will take this argument further and broaden it to include more than a narrowly psychoanalytic perspective. I will show also how associations among male peers are the developmental precursors of male dominance and indirectly of males' sex objectification of women.