A Conversation between Nancy Chodorow and Ilene Philipson

Abstract

ABSTRACT It is an immense pleasure to be here today with my mentor, Nancy Chodorow. In 1976 I entered graduate school in sociology specifically to study with Nancy. As an undergraduate I had read two brilliant articles that Nancy published as a graduate student prior to The Reproduction of Mothering, in which she used psychoanalysis “to account for the reproduction within each generation of certain general and nearly universal differences that characterize masculine and feminine personality and roles” (“Family Structure and Feminine Personality” in Rosaldo and Lamphere Women, Culture and Personality). I was dazzled. Nancy not only went on to chair my dissertation in sociology, but nine years later sat on my committee for my dissertation in clinical psychology that became On the Shoulders of Women: The Feminization of Psychotherapy. We both now are psychoanalysts, sociologists and feminists. While we each have traveled down our own paths, I always have wondered how Nancy, as a graduate student at Brandeis, could write with such courage, conviction and, well, chutzpah, to take on the project of not only understanding why women mother, but how gender is socially reproduced across generations and cultures. I also took this as an opportunity to discuss how her thinking and interests have changed over time since the publication of her groundbreaking Reproduction of Mothering, a book that heralded a new era in our understanding of gender and psychoanalysis.