Details

Subject(s)

• Mothers [Browse]
• Women—Psychology [Browse]
• Mother and child [Browse]
• Women and psychoanalysis [Browse]
• Gender identity [Browse]
• Psychoanalysis [Browse]

Summary note

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, virtually always take their place. Though fathers and other men spend varying amounts o f time with infants and children, the father is rarely a child's primary parent. Over the past few centuries, women of different ages, classes, and races have moved in and out of the paid labor force. Marriage and fertility rates have fluctuated considerably during this same period. Despite these changes, women have always cared for children, usually as mothers in families and occasionally as workers in child-care centers or as paid and slave domestics. Women's mothering is one of the few universal and enduring elements of the sexual division of labor. ... This book analyzes women's mothering and, in particular, the way women's mothering is reproduced across generations. Its central question is how do women today come to mother? By implication, it asks how we might change things to transform the sexual division of labor in which women mother. -- Introduction (pages 3-4).

Notes

Includes index.

Bibliographic references

Bibliography: p. 241-256.

Contents

• Part one: setting the problem: mothering and the social organization of gender.
• 1. Introduction.
• 2. Why women mother. the argument from nature; the role-training argument.
• 3. Psychoanalysis and Sociological Inquiry. considerations on "evidence".
• Part two: the psychoanalytic story.
• 4. Early psychological development. total dependence and the narcissistic relation to reality; primary love; the beginnings of self and the growth of object love; a note on exclusive mothering.
• 5. The relation to the mother and the mothering relation. the effects of early mothering; the maternal role; conclusions.
• 6. Gender differences in the preoedipal period. early psychoanalytic formations; the discovery of the preoedipal mother-daughter relationship; preoedipal mother-daughter relationships: the clinical picture; preoedipal mother-son relationships: the clinical picture; conclusions.
• 7. Object-relations and the female oedipal configutation. femininity: women's oedipal goal; the relation to the mother and the feminine "change of object"; relational complexities in the female Oedipus situation.
• 8. Oedipal resolution and adolescent replay. the ongoingness of the female Oedipus situation; mothers, daughters, and adolescence.
• 9. Freud: ideology and evidence. bias in the Freudian account; psychoanalytic critiques of Freud; biological determinism.
• 10. Conclusions on post-oedipal gender personality. family relations and oedipal experience; post-oedipal gender personality: a recapitulation.
• Part three: gender personality and the reproduction of mothering.
• 11. The sexual society of adult life. gender identification and gender role learning; family and economy; mothering, masculinity, and capitalism.
• 12. The psychodynamics of the family. oedipal asymmetries and heterosexual knots; the cycle completed mothers and children; gender personality and the reproduction of mothering.
• Afterward: women's mothering and women's liberation.

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Other title(s)

Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender

ISBN

• 0520031334
• 9780520031333
• 0520038924 ((pbk.))
• 9780520038929 ((pbk.))

LCCN

75027922

OCLC

3973571

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