A New Look at Core Gender and Gender Role Identity in Women: Commentary

Nancy J. Chodorow, Helen K. Gediman, and Adrienne Harris have written lucidly and instructively about the connections among psychoanalysis, feminism, and their own lives.1 As an outsider to psychoanalysis, I have learned from their papers and admire their scope and sincerity. Like all serious work, they provide rich insights but raise questions as well. The ones I wish to explore are periodization, the use of the term postmodernism, and the persistence of patriarchies and neopatriarchies. I tie my explorations together in an unexpected case study: a visit to Wichita, Kansas.

One of the most important tasks of historians, periodization is the naming of epochs and ages. It was a great concern of the first generation of feminist historians, who believed that the reigning periodization of Western history distorted the experiences of women. Famously, Joan Kelly asked, “Did women have a Renaissance?” and answered her question in the negative. In “The Social Relations of the Sexes,” Kelly (1976) urged her readers to “look at [all] ages or movements of great social change in terms of their liberation or repression of woman's potential, their import for the advancement of her humanity as well as