Thank you Cordelia for your great appreciation of the feminist collective and the psychoanalytic feminist collective inspired by it. All the brave women who dared to say what thy experienced in the sort of analysis that ended with an interpretation of penis envy, and then either walked out of the analysis or got married and lived happily ever after, gave voice to each other. We ended the fifty year stretch in which analysis meant insisting to the patient that penis envy was her deepest level of feeling. That view meant that women were built around a core of resentment, hatred, and, especially, envy. Even when Melanie Klein retaliated with a theory that both men and women were built around a core of envy, women were still seen as even more envious than men. Women envied the breast as men did, but they also envied the penis. That invidious view of women could only be objected to by women who were not themselves analysts or planning to become analysts or by women who were extraordinarily brave.
The view of women that sees us as caretakers of the body and the feelings is the view that encouraged women to become nurses, teachers, mothers, and social workers. As several male analysts of the 50's and 60's complained, once analytic training was open to psychologists and social workers, the field would be flooded with women. Furthermore they claimed women would lower the fees and the prestige of what they regarded as their field. And they were correct. Women have flooded the field, and fees are no longer as high as they were in those earlier times. Both of these outcomes have been, in my opinion, to the good.
Your emphasis on the instinct for survival as a female way of thinking is most interesting and is borne out by our recent experience of those countries headed by women having survived the virus better than those headed by men. Women leaders took the threat more seriously, moved
faster to combat the virus, and lost a smaller percentage of their counties' population.
I am grateful for your addition of this important conceptualization of the difference between men's and women's way of thinking. I think it comes from a different value system in which women think about the consequences to others as a measure of the good while men tend to think of the moral judgements in a hierarchical system which are the highest values. This is difference feminism. But you also stress accepting that women's way of thinking is of equal value as men's and this is equality feminism. I think that both kinds of feminism are useful and both are needed if we are to have respect for one another as fellow humans. Your own example as a women who thinks like a woman and succeeds like a man is inspiring to us all.