Obituary: Nancy Julia Chodorow, PhD (1944–2025)

Nancy Julia Chodorow, PhD, the eminent feminist sociologist and psychoanalyst, died in Boston, Massachusetts, on 14 October 2025, at 81. She died at home, surrounded and comforted by her family, during a vicious bout of a blood cancer, that now defied treatment. She will be sorely missed too by her many friends in academia and psychoanalysis, nationally and internationally.

Chodorow was born the younger of two sisters, in New York, to Jewish parents and a family of whom she often spoke fondly. Her father became a professor of physics and applied physics at Stanford University, California. She attributed her own fascination with structured thinking, mapping theories, and an ability never to take anything for granted to his influence. Her educated social worker mother was active, politically aware, and a fine role model of womanhood, as were other female members of her family of that generation. Serious work and interests outside the home for this future feminist were quite compatible with being female, in contrast (she later realised) with the many daughters less fortunate than she, in their professional encouragement. Chodorow

received a BA from Radcliffe College in 1966, and a PhD in sociology from Brandeis University in 1975. There she worked with Eggon Bittner, and Philip Slater, who had focused on mother–son dynamics in his critique of American culture. With him Chodorow famously noticed how neglected were the consideration of mother–daughter mutual influences, and she chose to study aspects of this family culture in her PhD thesis. This was a key step for Chodorow’s contributions. She taught women's studies at Wellesley College, and sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Joining the Berkeley Sociology Department in 1986, she became a full professor in 1989 and helped create and develop the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at UC Berkeley. During that time, in addition, she became a candidate in the San Franciso Center for Psychoanalysis