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Twenty years ago, feminism and psychoanalytic theory would have been strange bedfellows, at least in America. Then, no one could have foreseen that some of our most ardent feminists might turn to Freud, since many of them were blaming him for patriarchy, the subjugation of women and all sorts of other despised traditions—in order to provide explanations or even solutions to these conditions. As part of the New Left, these feminists located women's oppression in class society, in the material relations of work. Nancy Chodorow was among the first of them to question such an approach, and to recognize that women had been submissive, and had not been leaders, long before the advent of capitalism and its accompanying mode of production.
Nine of the ten essays in Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory originally were published between 1971 and 1987. They are in chronological order. Aside from their actual content, they note the gradual and tentative turn to psychoanalysis not only by Chodorow but by other radical and not so radical feminists. All of them, again and again, came up against a dead end when trying to explain why not even liberated, professional and independent women could totally rid themselves of submissive and nurturing tendencies without either feeling guilty or rejecting their femininity. Among them, Chodorow stands out for her grasp and careful use of psychoanalytic theory.
Chodorow's concerns and references, and her critiques, are rooted in the American milieu, and in her own trajectory: she is a sociologist who turned first to anthropology and then to psychoanalysis and who, after publishing The Reproduction of Mothering in 1978, became a bona fide Freudian therapist in San Francisco. Thus she began by questioning the sociologists' stereotypical focus on sex roles, and the assumption that there are biologically derived and inevitably male and female psychological characteristics. And she wondered why in almost every society women are economically,