Identity Freedom

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 generations. Therefore, Nancy Chodorow's thesis is that a woman's sense of self is derived from an attachment to their mothers and that sense of self is fostered by a male-dominated, "asymmetric" society. While males can exercise their superiority by merely remaining in roles society expects of them, women can only actualize their sense of self by diverting their energies to nurturing.

Daughters then watch their mothers; and this sows the seeds for the sense of self-derivation from maternal attachment. Simone De Beauvoir, on the other hand, presents different historical and contemporary scenarios as to why women, who logically, should not be subservient to men in society, actually are. The reasons she places this before the reader are: that women are essential in the pro-creational scheme of thing; that men need women, even as sexual objects.

She bemoans the fact that while men can identify themselves as individuals; women have to identify themselves as women before asserting their individualism. Beauvoir writes that in order for a woman to be identified, she has to attach herself to a man. Beuvoir's thesis is that woman is the "Other." (Beauvoir and Parshley, 1979) If we consider a society as a diagram of concentric circles, the closer to the center an entity is, the greater its importance.

In this circle, women are always relegated to the nether regions far away from the center. The idea of the Other is not unique, neither is it original. The concept of Other has been used by every part of society that has considered itself an outcast. Edward Said used the concept of Other for those that were victims of colonialism and imperialism in his landmark book, "Orientalism." (Said, 1979) Beauvoir believed that this Other'ness of women transcended every victimized group and bore the brunt of society twice over.

She talks about slavery in America and the struggles during the Civil Rights. She also talks about the victimization of the Jews. The point Beauvoir makes is that these speech communities used their victimization to cohere into self-protecting units: "We, the Jews," or "We, the Negroes," for instance. But through society as a whole or in specific speech communities, women were never accorded equal status. Beauvoir avers that there have been efforts to achieve equity. Women now have the rights to the franchise and equal opportunities to education and fulfillment.

But even then there is a problem associated with unequal opportunities for equal pay for the same work done and the proverbial glass ceiling for women's promotion. Beauvoir hints at the possibility that there are other factors at play: perhaps psychological or perhaps genetic. Comparing these studies is like comparing apples and oranges. The only similarity in the entities -- apples and oranges -- is that they are fruits.

In extending this analogy to the pronouncements of Beauvoir and Chodorow, one sees that there are no points of arguments or disagreements. Yes, these philosophers agree on one basic premise: women have, through the ages, been subjugated, and continue to go through life without achieving true self-determination and equal stature with men. The studies, however, do complement each other. Beauvoir goes to great lengths to establish historical, philosophical and societal bases for women not being accorded equitable status. She knows that there is a problem. She annunciates the problem.

But all she can offer is the following: "The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face-to-face with the correlative unit." Chodorow, on the other hand, perhaps inspired by the above statement (or maybe not) attempts to answer this question by attempting to answer the question from a psychoanalytic perspective. Chodorow begins her essay by decrying the half-hearted attempts of sociologists, feminists and analysts who do not go after the real reasons.

Chodorow's entire idea is to make a reasoned argument the concept of recurring motherhood is what forces women into pre-defined roles that preclude them from achieving equality. There are problems in Chodorow's arguments, though. She premises the entire argument of subjugation on the Oedipal (perhaps, non-sexual) attachments between mothers and daughters. She avers that this is the primary reason for women being not accorded equal status in society.

Of course, she does not completely discount the societal factors and the aspects of meeting society's expectation that women feel that they have to meet. But societal effects are merely support constructs to Chodorow's psychoanalysis. Here, the Blank Slate argument comes into play. (Asimov, 1997) Studies have shown that, even without prompting, girls and boys in their childhood interactions and games automatically gravitate to activities that are typically boy.