What is it that turns a book from a “product of its time” into a classic and, therefore, in some important respects, into something timeless? Is it the content or its reception? Is it the author or her readers? In truth, it is a mercurial combination of the two, producing “something more”. Not unlike the “analytic third”1 created between two people in psychotherapy, there is a magic in a classic that exceeds the sum of its parts. It is this relationship between the idea and the audience, between the book and its historical moment, that ignites and endures in a classic. As Victor Hugo memorably put it, “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come”.2 Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender is one such book. It speaks both to the universal: the mother at the centre of our collective psyche, and the particular: the historical moment of social change in which it was caught up and helped to create. More poignantly, it provides a framework for understanding our own unique relationships with our mothers. Like all good classics, we can read ourselves into its pages.
The Reproduction of Mothering is a tale told through the eyes of an acute observer who read and embodied the political moment—the zeitgeist—of her time, and transformed it into a language useable for scholars, clinical practitioners, activists, and laypeople. This too was integral to the appeal of Chodorow’s book: it’s broad, indeed profound, impact across the humanities and social sciences, including in sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and in the emergent fields of women’s and gender studies. In addition to its compelling subject matter—mothers and mothering—Chodorow’s book endures because it integrates insights from several disciplines. As she says, The Reproduction of Mothering “… insists, as have all my writings since, upon the inextricable interconnectedness and mutual constitution of psyche, society, and culture”.3 This feat was recognized in several awards and symposia including the Jessie Barnard prize for Women in Society, a division of the American Sociological Association, in 1979, a special issue of Signs in 1981 and Feminism and Psychology in 2002 and, in 1996, it was voted one of the ten most influential books in the social sciences in the preceding twenty-five years by the flagship academic journal Contemporary Sociology.4
Forty years has passed since The Reproduction of Mothering was published (indeed forty-two years by the time this book is published). Nancy reminded me that in the Judaic tradition forty years is a biblically resonant passage of time: the time of wandering and reflection.5 It is interesting to place a book so fundamentally about time—embodied, generational, cyclical, maternal time no less!—outside time, in the preternaturally masculine realm of the transcendent. And yet any book that forms part of the canon is surely in the realm of the transcendent? It is that which stands apart crystallising insights that are both of their time and yet reach beyond and speak to those who come after. This book is arranged generationally for precisely this reason, to recognize the fertile ground of its birth, its reception by a generation of peers (“mothers”) and grad students (“daughters”), many of whom were inspired and transformed professionally, and in some cases personally (see in particular Ilene Philipson, Adrienne E. Harris and Daphne de Marneffe), and a third generation of students and scholars (“granddaughters”) who have taken up, used, critiqued and transformed The Reproduction of Mothering applying it to new ideas and social contexts.
The Reproduction of Mothering Revisited
The main thesis of the book—well known by now but worth rehearsing in broad outline—is twofold. First, there is the psychoanalytic component whereby Chodorow traces, through object relations theory, including what she now calls the “American independent school”,6 the internal psychic world of the infant daughter and son, and their intersubjective (conscious and unconscious) relationship with their mother, and she to them. Second, is the sociological component, woven throughout, whereby Chodorow traces the historically specific societal and familial constellation within which the development of gender takes shape. Chodorow begins with a seemingly obvious question: why do women mother? And her answer is a fascinating excursus into psychoanalytic theory, the sociological peculiarities of the late twentieth century nuclear family and the evolution of the male and female psyches produced therein. The short answer is women mother because they were mothered, which is, in important respects, a more psychologically potent experience (for both genders) in the context of the modern family with its highly specialized gender roles and relative isolation from kin and community. As Chodorow observes, the historical peculiarity of the modern western family with its asymmetrical gender roles, namely fathers at work and mothers at home (in the middle-class and still at the time of Chodorow’s writing), is that mothers largely mother in isolation.7
Sons and daughters are recreated, then, by mothers who have lost their traditional supports (a situation that remains the case today, even as women have entered the labour force en masse). For Chodorow, this social context shapes the internal worlds of familial protagonists in critical and enduring ways. Conventional sociological understandings of role learning and socialisation were insufficient to explain why women mother, suggested Chodorow, who turned rather to psychoanalysis to elucidate the complex internal worlds of (socially situated) mothers and the male and female children they birthed, nurtured and raised. For Chodorow, it is the intra-psychic dyad between mother and daughter, and its intergenerational transmission, that is central to the “reproduction of mothering”. Here we see the confluence of gender and generation. As she says,
I investigate the mother-daughter relationship and how women create and recreate this relationship internally. It is a cyclical process that I break into at the daughter’s birth, but developmental outcomes in the mother already situate that birth and subsequent development and give it characteristic features.8
The mother is first a daughter. Through this experience of being mothered, she is able to regress to her own infancy9 and more easily identify with the needs and subjective states of her infant. This unconscious and conscious process shapes her care of the infant, and his or her conscious and unconscious experience of that care, which, over time, and in the context of familial relationships and societal gender norms, is internalized. This pr...