Reproduction Of Mothering Research Articles

Nancy Chodorow and “The Reproduction of Mothering”: Forty Years On, by Petra Bueskens, ed.

Nancy Chodorow and “The Reproduction of Mothering”: Forty Years On, by Petra Bueskens, ed.

Mothers reproducing the social: Chodorow and beyond

In The reproduction of mothering, Nancy Chodorow laid the blueprint for understanding mothers and daughters in their intricate psychosexual identification and differentiation. Synthesising object relations theory with feminist sociological concerns regarding gender equality, and the psychosocial reproduction not just of mothering but also of misogyny, Chodorow brought together complex psychoanalytic theory with feminist utopian projects. The mother–daughter relationship had been hitherto dismissed in orthodox psychoanalysis as irrelevant to the central Oedipal drama. In situating mother–daughter relations both within the classic ‘family romance’, and also prior to and constitutive of it, Chodorow bequeathed a critically important legacy. She provided a new psychological language for understanding female subjectivity, inclusive of yet differentiating the mother’s and the daughter’s subjectivity. This article reviews Chodorow’s classic work, The reproduction of mothering, while also extending her original formulation to a contemporary understanding of changing gendered social relations. Drawing on the recent work of Alison Stone, I elucidate the process of not only reproducing but also reinventing mothering. From here, I tentatively explore how mothers are symbolically and actually ‘reproducing the social’; or, taking their maternal identities into civil society and transforming that society to incorporate and reflect their interests. Citizen mothers, I argue, have the potential to transform human relations, economies and polities, integrating an ‘ethic of care’ with an ‘ethic of justice’. The last section of this article explores the emergence of ‘autonomous mothers’ and their impact.

Ethological observations of reproductive qualities of Aberdeen-Angus and Grey Ukrainian breed in the conditions of forest-steppe and steppe zones of Ukraine

The results of researches in modern herds of meat breeds – classical British, Aberdeen-Angus and autochthonous gray Ukrainian for conducting of pollination in research farms “Polivanivka” of the Institute of Agriculture of Steppe Regions of NAAS of Ukraine and “Progress” of Chernihiv Institute of Agro-Industrial Production in 2009–2012. The ethological behavior of mothers (cows) and their calves was studied in the conditions of keeping and growing livestock on the technology of meat cattle breeding. Animals for conducting research were selected taking into account age, body weight of cows, sex calves, body weight of calves at birth. Collection of accounting materials was carried out according to the data of the primary technological and pedigree records, artificial insemination magazines, materials of ethological observations. Observations were conducted in accordance with the task of preserving genetic diversity in gene pool herds of Aberdeen-Angus and Gray Ukrainian breeds. The herds of animals in the experimental farms kept the meat keeping technology adopted by the farms. The feeding of breeding stock of animals of these breeds was carried out in accordance with established and accepted at experimental farms rations, which consisted of the presence and number of harvested at farms feed. Obtained materials indicate the plasticity and the ability to control the system reproduction reproductive population in modern economic conditions farms. Attention is paid not only to purely selective approaches, but also an attempt is made to substantiate the necessity of adapting breeding breeds to modern systems of economic relations. Knowledge of the ethology of Aberdin-Angus and gray Ukrainian breeds in the conditions of the forest-steppe and steppe zones of Ukraine will allow controlling the processes of reproduction of mother and repair animals in livestock breeding herds, as well as the conservation of genetic resources of aboriginal breeds.

“You Just Know It’s the Only Thing You Can Think”: A Conversation with Chodorow

ABSTRACTNancy Julia Chodorow (1944–) is a pioneer feminist theorist who brought together academic fields of sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis in her work related to feminist theories and psychoanalysis. Her first book, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978), gave primacy to a more generalized account of the developmental and familial origins of prevalent psychological differences between femininity and masculinity from a psychoanalytic sociological viewpoint. Her later books, Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (1994), The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (1999), and Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice (2012), bring in a rich interplay among socio-structural influences (i.e., culture) as well as intra- and inter-psychic dynamic processes, emphasizing more the importance of individuality and subjectivity. Based on an interview I had with Chodorow on the development of her thought, this paper gives Chodorow’s account of her personal history and academic background, current manifestations in feminist social science research and feminist psychoanalysis based on her contribution and legacy, and reflective narratives on the unfolding of feminist and psychoanalytic theories from the 1970s onward. Chodorow’s note to the next generation of feminist psychotherapists is also included.

Behavior and reproduction of mothers as well as behavior of the second generation pups are influenced by maternal separation

Behavior and reproduction of mothers as well as behavior of the second generation pups are influenced by maternal separation

The Berenstain Bears and the Reproduction of Mothering

The Berenstain Bears and the Reproduction of Mothering

Evolutionary Theory, Kinship, and Childbirth in Cross-Cultural Perspective

The authors combine evolutionary theory with the anthropological study of kinship to account for cross-cultural diversity in birth-related investments by kin. Four hypotheses are formulated using paternal certainty, gender, and kinship laterality as independent variables. They test these hypotheses with data from the 60-culture Probability Sample of the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF). Their hypotheses are generally confirmed. For example, grandmothers and aunts provide more direct birth care than grandfathers and uncles. However, they did have some unanticipated results. Fathers provide as much direct birth care as grandmothers and aunts. In addition, they found paternal certainty to be a better predictor of direct birth care than kinship laterality, and kinship laterality to be a better predictor of indirect care. They explain this difference by arguing that direct birth care is the most important kind of investment kin make to ensure the survival and reproduction of mothers and newborns.

Born into a World at War: Listening for Affect and Personal Meaning

"Problems of patienthood are caused by outer and inner conditions," Erik Erikson tells us (1964, 89). Outer conditions of war, politics, economics, and culture affect our thoughts and actions, but they do not, without being filtered through inner life, cause them. Inner conditions of temperamental propensity, affect, fantasy, and conflict predispose us to behave in certain ways, but they do not, apart from encounters with external reality, cause us to do so. This is a duality that challenges psychoanalytic theory and practice, from work with individual patients to psychocultural, psychosocial, or psychohistorical analysis. In another duality, psychoanalysis begins from the individual and provides, in fact, the most comprehensive theory of individuality. Yet from the beginning, in both its accounts of patients and the self-analytic writings of its founders, psychoanalysis has focused on patterns of fantasy, neurosis, character, and development that are widespread and has brought cultural, social, and historical factors into its theoretical and clinical reflections. My own work follows the Eriksonian precept. In The Power of Feelings (1999), I suggested that people create and experience social processes and cultural meanings not only materially and discursively but also psychodynamically—in unconscious, affect-laden, nonlinguistic, immediately felt images and fantasies that everyone creates from birth about self, self and other, body, and the world. Social and historical processes are given, and they will certainly lead to some patterns of experiencing (including those shaped by the family unit) in common, as I documented in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), but this experiencing will be refracted through personal [End Page 297] individuality and be as much affective and nonlinguistic as it is cognitive and verbal. Psychoanalytic listening, likewise, begins from a duality. In clinical work, the goal is to understand, and to help a patient to understand, his unconscious life—defenses, conflicts, fantasies, and affects that are importantly and by definition nonlinguistic—but even listening with the third ear must begin by attending to spoken words. The psychoanalyst then uses her own affects, as well as observation of the patient's nonverbal behaviors and communications, to find meaning. Secondary process language and narrative are only indicative of what is beyond and before in primary process feeling and thought. In this paper, I describe how I have worked within these dualities of internal and external reality and primary and secondary process thinking to listen to and interpret stories of a group of people born toward the end of World War II. I point to the ineluctable individuality of historical experience while also emphasizing the consequences of belonging to a particular generation or age cohort. I suggest that history affects people psychologically no less than it does physically and materially, and that this psychological impact is registered emotionally and unconsciously as well as consciously and cognitively. Complementing a sociological insight into the relevance of cultural and historical conditions to an understanding of the inner life, the psychoanalytic study of individual subjectivities affords an enriched and fuller understanding of history and culture. Specifically, I have explored affective and familial themes in first-person narratives about being born during World War II (Tymoczko and Blackmun 2000). These narratives were all written by members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1965, who were at the time of writing in their early fifties. As a member of this class, I furnished an epilogue to the book. 1 The contributors form part of a classic sociological generation, having been born almost without exception in 1943 and 1944, and then finding themselves at a particular time of life at the same institution, and having been affected by the social and intellectual currents of both the societies and period in which [End Page 298] they were born and those in which they came of age. I hope to show that by listening for affect we can find, within the wide variety of stories told by people from different backgrounds and countries, strikingly similar emotional themes and tonalities...

The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender: A Reappraisal

The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender: A Reappraisal

Editor's Introduction: The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender: A Reappraisal

Editor's Introduction: The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender: A Reappraisal

Extract from The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender

Extract from The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender

Home Fires: Doris Lessing, Colonial Architecture, and the Reproduction of Mothering

In a 1980 interview, Doris Lessing speculated about effect the proportions of buildings have on the people who live in them, insisting, is not a metaphorical thought at all. This is a practical thought, which think about more and more.' The building most crucial to Lessing's own self-construction was the rickety old settler's farmhouse her family built and lived in for years in the Lomagundi district of Southem Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe). No house, Lessing writes, could ever have for me the intimate charm of that one.2 Since living there she has never settled down for long; as she notes in the memoir Going Home, I don't live anywhere; never have since left that first house on the kopje.3 That first house was simply a thatch-topped homestead, rapidly constructed in the local style, with linoleum laid over floors of dung, mud, and blood, and earthen walls in which homets would occasionally nest. From the day it was built, the house began to erode, and only attentive maintenance kept it from merging back into the bush that spawned it. As the child of settlers, Lessing's claim that the house in the Southem Rhodesian bush is her true home reveals a complex set of affiliations with a land the English occupied by force, a land that, in more than just a nominal sense, no longer exists. The transitory nature of Lessing's childhood home should not be taken as a measure of its influence or importance. Rather, it is emblematic of Southem Rhodesian settler culture and for the imperialist mentality that built it. Specifically, the house illuminates how boundary markers were deployed to police the doctrine of racial hierarchy and how notions of femininity and domesticity, seemingly marginal to colonization, actually undergirded the project of empire. In this essay, read the form, construction, and use of Lessing's childhood home as an architectural representation of colonial subjectivity in order to discuss the cross-hatched operations in the colonies of gender, race, and class that, as Anne McClintock has argued, come into existence in and through relation to each other-if in contradictory and conflictual ways.4

Questioning Feminine Connection

This paper examines Nancy Chodorow's theory of feminine connection and masculine separation in The Reproduction of Mothering. First it demonstrates that, contrary to many feminists’ interpretations, Chodorow's theory does not portray masculine separation as a social problem to which feminine connection is the solution. Then it shows that Chodorow's apparently intended theory is incoherent. Finally, it argues that Chodorow's claims imply another theory that is coherent and that deserves feminists’ attention.

The Reproduction of Mothering in Mariam, Queen of Jewry: A Defense of "Biographical" Criticism

The Reproduction of Mothering in Mariam, Queen of Jewry: A Defense of "Biographical" Criticism

Questioning Feminine Connection

This paper examines Nancy Chodorow's theory of feminine connection and masculine separation inThe Reproduction of Mothering. First it demonstrates that, contrary to many feminists’ interpretations, Chodorow's theory does not portray masculine separation as a social problem to which feminine connection is the solution. Then it shows that Chodorow's apparently intended theory is incoherent. Finally, it argues that Chodorow's claims imply another theory that is coherent and that deserves feminists’ attention.

Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages ed. by Clare A. Lees

REVIEWS CLARE A. LEES, ed. Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages. Medieval Culture Series, vol. 7. Minneapolis and London: Univer­ sity of Minnesota Press, 1994. Pp. xxv, 193. $44.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. The study of masculinity--or masculinities, in keeping with the notion that manliness is constructed in a variety of ways across time and according to place--0ften elicits the quip, "Isn't that redundant?" History, after all, is his story. This collection of essays, the first of its kind in medieval studies, takes this question very seriously. Thelma Fenster argues in her preface that while the study of women in history and literature has often been shaped by gender, "the relationship between a man's gender and his acts remains to be examined. Women have been treated as material and local, whereas men have remained untouchable and unreachable" (p. x). As the ten essays illustrate, concentrating on masculinity, particularly on the question of how it is represented and reproduced, can shape our reading in fruitful and sometimes unexpected ways. More important, Medieval Masculinities dem­ onstrates forcefully that no single, monologic male identity in medieval Western Europe can be posited; taken together, the essays effectively cali­ brate differences in representation from one genre or discourse or time or place to another. Before I touch on individual essays, a word on contemporary men's studies is in order. There is a core group of texts, written mainly by sociolo­ gists and psychologists in the U.S., Great Britain, and Australia, that con­ stitutes the "first wave" of research in men's studies. All of the leading scholars concerned with the study of masculinity take as their premise the cultural constructedness of male identity; many take a psychoanalytic ap­ proach. However, their relationship to feminism is often problematic: some scholars cite feminist scholarship in an extremely selective way; others ig­ nore it altogether. The overall effect has been to downplay or deemphasize the activist agenda of feminism and feminist scholarship. Moreover, by stressing object-relations theory (best exemplified by Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering) at the expense of other psychoanalytic models, some scholars of masculinity have perpetuated a "blame the mom" attitude. The essays in Medieval Masculinities avoid these and other epis­ temological problems that sometimes characterize the academic study of masculinity; they do so by historicizing masculinity, grounding its effects and symptoms in specific events, trends, and texts. (Indeed, treatments of masculinity by literary scholars are usually superior to this nascent disci­ pline's foundational texts.) 241 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER In the first essay, "The Herren/rage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050-1150," Jo Ann McNamara focuses on the early twelfth cen­ tury in Western Europe, a time of "broad social changes, complicated by the ideological struggle between celibate and married men for leadership of the Christian world, [which} precipitated a masculine identity crisis" (p. 3). She dubs this crisis the Herren/rage. General and assertive in its claims rather than demonstrative, this essay creates a context for the essays that follow. Clare R. Kinney emphasizes the importance of "continuous and ulti­ mately equivocal renegotiation" of "chivalric manhood" (p. 47) in "The (Dis)Embodied Hero and the Signs of Manhood in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." The green girdle suggests how manliness is not necessarily stable and fixed; the adoption of the girdle by the court at the end of the poem illustrates how a dominant class can control its own representation. In "Men and Beou·ulf," Clare Lees takes up the history of Beou·zdfscholar­ ship as it has shaped our understanding of Anglo-Saxon manliness in the poem; she performs admirable readings of key texts by J. R. R. Tolkien, James W. Earl, and Gillian Overing. Lees then goes on to develop a reading of her own, in which she argues that Beowulf"is as much about the limits of aggression in this male aristocratic heroic world as it is about its suc­ cesses" (p. 144). The poem is by no means an unequivocal celebration of violence; rather, while it "naturalizes gender and thereby promotes mas­ culinism" (p. 146), it also reveals the tensions-and costs...

Is Mean Litter Size the Most Productive? A Test in Columbian Ground Squirrels

We studied the evolution of litter size in natural and experimentally manipulated populations of Columbian ground squirrels (Spermophilus columbianus) in eastern Washington state and southwest Alberta. Litter size at weaning in a large natural population (mean = 3.51 pups/litter, 248 litters) was significantly lower than the litter size (6 pups) that produced the most offspring surviving to yearling age class. This evidence contradicted Lack's "optimal litter size" hypothesis, which predicts that the most productive litter size should approximate the mean. Litter size had no significant effect on the subsequent survival or reproduction of mothers, contrary to the negative effects predicted by the "cost of reproduction" hypothesis. Litter success varied among years, and good and bad years for reproduction could be experimentally simulated with food supplementation. However, small samples of the largest litters rendered the "bad—years" hypothesis inappropriate for application to our data. Proportional survival of offspring was relatively constant among different litter sizes, contrary to the necessary condition of the "cliff edge" hypothesis of a dramatic decrease in survival of young from the largest litters. The data supported the "individual optimization" hypothesis most strongly. As predicted, the number of surviving offspring increased with litter size, although in one population the six largest litters (2.4% of 248 litters) suffered reduced success. In natural and food—supplemented populations, changes in maternal body mass were associated with changes in litter size (r = 0.205 to 0.926). Because survival of young remained relatively constant as litter size increased, these correlations resulted in greater offspring success for mothers in better body condition.

Righting Sendak: The Psyche of Mother Goose

Righting Sendak:The Psyche of Mother Goose Anne Lundin (bio) Lucy Rollin . Cradle and All: A Cultural and Psychoanalytic Study of Nursery Rhymes. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1992. I have always been a bit peeved at Maurice Sendak for his disdain of Kate Greenaway's 1881 classic, Mother Goose; or, The Old Nursery Rhymes. I have a particular fondness for her work and a certain weakness for romanticized childhoods in English gardens. Sendak charged that Greenaway had no sense of the real spirit of Mother Goose and even accused her of initiating a whole school of sentimental Mother Goose collections. My indignation was somewhat lightened by reading Iona Opie and Peter Opie's I Saw Esau (illustrated by Sendak), in which the earthiness of rhymes evoked other than Greenaway images. Sendak's most recent book, We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, reveals even further the psychic complexity of some of the familiar and less than familiar verse. Could he be right in his idiosyncratic vision of Mother Goose? My sensibilities have grown even further with this provocative critical study of nursery rhymes. I will never see Mother Goose in the same slant of light again. Lucy Rollin's Cradle and All: A Cultural and Psychoanalytic Study of Nursery Rhymes explores different voices—the cultural as well as psychological meanings that shape the text of this early folk poetry, a rowdy street lore. Aware of a decided skepticism toward Freudian interpretation or, more specifically, of the idiosyncratic Bettelheim approach toward fairy tales, Rollin draws together the many voices of psychoanalysis, literary criticism, folklore studies, cultural history, and cultural anthropology to express meanings that lie deep within nursery verse. These meanings may be purposeful—intentional messages from [End Page 236] adult to child—as well as unconscious recordings of the human experience, its darkness and light. Much to her credit, Rollin is tempered in her approach toward the psychoanalysis of folk culture. She acknowledges the delicate nature of her research, the controversies within. As a feminist scholar, Rollin also acknowledges her own resistance to the sexism of the rhymes, as well as to the persistent attempts to alter them, prescriptively, toward modern gender standards. The author refers to a commentary on the hazards of psychoanalytic literary theory in Children's Literature "The Reproduction of Mother in Charlotte's Web" (vol. 18, 1990) and addresses the concerns for a more cultural approach. In this particular volume, various critics—such as Michael Steig, Jerry Phillips, Ian Wojcik-Andrews, U. C. Knoepflmacher, Patrick Horgan, and Jack Zipes—critique the application of absolutist Bettelheimian-Freudian assumptions and argue, instead, for more elastic, multiple perspectives. Rollin positions her work within a broad framework of social history and conjoins various interpretive disciplines. Moreover, revealing her own relation to the particular theory she has chosen, she describes the psychoanalytic approach as "a congenial and informative way of looking at human behavior and at literature" (xv). Rollin distinguishes her own approach as a departure from classical Freudian concerns and toward object relations and ego psychology, which are only briefly defined in a sentence or two. Although I appreciate the author's nontechnical rhetoric, I would have appreciated a fuller explanation of these distinctions. She does articulate her own bent toward nursery rhymes to be their "containment of strong urges and the use of defensive and adaptive maneuvers in the service of maturation." Rollin shapes her cogent analysis around specific categories—animal rhymes, courtship and marriage rhymes, lullabies, and amusements—that examine nursery rhymes as a body of verse. Rollin observes a considerable amount of cruelty to animals, with an ambivalent strain of tenderness. Nature can be tamed, they seem to say. The romantic verse reveals a complex relationship between the sexes and a fear of womanly arts. The verse that accompanies holding and playing activities between adult and child is both gentle and rough and tumble. Thus follows cradle and all—rock-a-bye and then the fall. Rollin also examines the adaptation of verse, a kind of censoring and controlling process that is ongoing and all too contemporaneous. Whether the cause is ecological, fundamentalist, or gender free, many attempts have been made to purge the...

Intentionally Childless Women: Another View of Women's Development

Most scholarly work on women's development assumes or documents the "reproduction of mothering." The existence of women who resist motherhood challenges universalizing assumptions advanced by these theories. This article draws on the life stories of 34 intentionally childless married women to paint a more contradictory picture of women's development that allows for the variations in desires, talents, and orientations that actually occur among women.

Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A British Sociologist's ViewVirginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Elizabeth AbelMelanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory. C. Fred AlfordThe Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. Jessica BenjaminBetween Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Teresa BrennanFeminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. Nancy ChodorowPsychoanalysis and . .

SYCHOANALYTIC FEMINISM has now established itself in a certain way academically, but the closer one looks at this new field, the more complicated the relationships between feminisms and psychoanalyses become. At first sight, it is easy to point to two books that have dominated feminist thinking about psychoanalysis and provided flags under which the two main parties have rallied. Psychoanalysis and Feminism by Juliet Mitchell, a British socialist feminist, was published in 1974. It argued that the Freudian tradition (which includes Jacques Lacan) provided an understanding of paternal power in the feminine unconscious that feminism needed if it was to grapple successfully with a patriarchal cultural order. The Reproduction of Mothering by Nancy Chodorow, an American feminist sociologist, was published in 1970. It argued that attending to the neglected mother and daughter, through the framework of the object relations school within psychoanalysis, would offer feminism a more relevant model for understanding gender.1 The inflhence of these two books has been immense. Mitchell's book has come to stand for psychoanalytic purism and Lacanianism, while Chodorow's has come to represent a much more popular feminist eclecticism. The authors-both of whom have subsequently turned to psychoanalytic training (Mitchell sooner and Chodorow later)-to a large extent have continued to elaborate and defend the arguments they made in those classic texts. Both, however, have dispensed with or radically changed the social dimensions of the original arguments. Mitchell had set the conclusion of Psychoanalysis and Feminism within an Althusserian Marxist framework of ideology and cultural revolution, now lost from