Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (1963; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).
Pomeroy, Sarah B., Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (New York: Schocken Books, 1975).
Rubin, Gayle, “The Traffic in Women,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
Shorter, Edward, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
MOTHERING, MALE DOMINANCE, AND CAPITALISM
Nancy Chodorow
Women mother. In our society, as in most societies, women not only bear children. They also take primary responsibility for infant care, spend more time with infants and children than do men, and sustain primary emotional ties with infants. When biological mothers do not parent, other women, rather than men, take their place. Though fathers and other men spend varying amounts of time with infants and children, fathers are never routinely a child’s primary parent. These facts are obvious to observers of everyday life.
Because of the seemingly natural connection between women’s childbearing and lactation capacities and their responsibility for child care, and because of the uniquely human need for extended care in childhood, women’s mothering has been taken for granted. It has been assumed to be inevitable by social scientists, by many feminists, and certainly by those opposed to feminism. As a result, the profound importance of women’s mothering for family structure, for relations between the sexes, for ideology about women, and for the sexual division of labor and sexual inequality both inside the family and in the nonfamilial world is rarely analyzed.
A Note on Family and Economy
Uniquely among early social theorists, Frederick Engels divided the material basis of society into two spheres, that of material production and that of human reproduction.1 He argued that the two spheres together determined the nature of any particular society. Engels makes clear that he does not think these aspects of social life develop or express themselves in biologically self-evident or unmediated ways, for he equates each with their respective social forms—the production of the means of existence with labor, and the production of people with the family.
Anthropologist Gayle Rubin, in an important recent contribution to the development of feminist theory,2 pushes further Engels’ conception that two separate spheres organize society, and she reforms and expands it in an even more sociological vein. Marx and Marxists, she points out, have convincingly argued two things about any society’s organized economic activity, its “mode of production.” One is that this activity is a fundamental determining and constituting element (some would say the fundamental determining and constituting element) of the society. The second is that it does not emanate directly from nature (is, rather, socially constructed), nor is it describable in solely technological or mechanically economic terms. Rather, a mode of production consists of the technology and social organization through which a society appropriates and transforms nature for purposes of human consumption and transforms the experience of human needs to require further manipulations of nature.
Rubin suggests, in an analytic system parallel to this Marxian view, that every society contains, in addition to a mode of production, a “sex-gender system”—“systematic ways to deal with sex, gender, and babies.”3 The sex-gender system includes ways in which biological sex becomes cultural gender, a sexual division of labor, social relations for the production of gender and of gender-organized social worlds, rules and regulations for sexual object choice, and concepts of childhood. The sex-gender system is, like a society’s mode of production, a fundamental determining and constituting element of society, socially constructed, and subject to historical change and development. Empirically, Rubin suggests, kinship and family organization form the locus of any society’s sex-gender system. Kinship and family organization consist in and reproduce socially organized gender and sexuality.
We can locate features of a sex-gender system and a mode of production in our own society. In addition to assigning women primary parenting functions, our sex-gender system, as all systems to my knowledge, creates two and only two genders out of the panoply of morphological and genetic variations found in infants, and maintains a heterosexual norm. It also contains historically generated and societally more specific features: its family structure is largely nuclear, and its sexual division of labor locates women first in the home and men first outside of it. It is male dominant and not sexually egalitarian, in that husbands traditionally have rights to control wives and power in the family; women earn less than men and have access to a narrower range of jobs; women and men tend to value men and men’s activities more; and in numerous other ways that have been documented and redocumented since well before the early feminist movement. Our mode of production is more and more exclusively capitalist.
That our society contains a mode of production and a sex-gender system does not differentiate it from previous societies or from current nonindustrialized societies. The ease with which we can recognize the distinction between the two spheres, however, is a product of our own unique history, during which material production has progressively left the home, the family has been eliminated as a productive economic unit, and women and men have in some sense divided the public and domestic spheres between them. The distinction that we easily draw, however, between the economy (“men’s world”) and the family (“women’s world”), and the analytic usefulness in our separation of the mode of production and the sex-gender system, does not mean that these two systems are not empirically or structurally connected. Rather, they are linked (and almost inextricably intertwined) in numerous ways. Of these ways, women’s mothering is that pivotal structural feature of our sex-gender system—of the social organization of gender, ideology about women, and the psychodynamic of sexual inequality—that links it most significantly with our mode of production.
Women’s Mothering and the Social Organization of Gender
Women’s mothering is a central and defining structural feature of our society’s organization of gender, one that it has in common with all other societies. Over the past few centuries women of different ages, classes, and races have moved in and out of the paid labor force as the demand for workers has shifted and the wage structure varied. Marriage and fertility rates have fluctuated considerably during this same period. When there have been children, however, women have cared for them, usually as mothers in families and occasionally as workers in childcare centers or as paid or slave domestics.
There are few universal statements we can make about the sociology of the sexes, about the sexual division of labor, about family structure and practices. Margaret Mead early pointed to the unexpected malleability and variability of temperaments between and among the sexes in different societies.4 Since then, ethnographic research has confirmed Mead’s claim and has enabled us to extend it to include most of the activities we normally characterize as masculine or feminine.
This variation is not limitless, however.5 A few features of our own sexual division of labor and kinship system remain which we can tentatively characterize as universal. (Very importantly, all societies do have a sexual division of labor.) These include women’s involvement in routine daily cooking for their immediate families (festive cooking, by contrast, is often done by men) and heterosexuality as a sexual norm and organizational principle of family organization and the structure of marriage. In addition, where hunting of large animals and war-making take place, these activities are masculine specializations.
Finally, we find universally that men with full adult status do not routinely care for small children, especially for infants. Women care for infants and children, and when they receive help, it is from children and old people.
