Mary Brown Parlee

Nancy Chodorow is a sociologist, with a background in anthropology, and a feminist scholar. She has written a brilliant and controversial book. In it she explores the psychological processes through which females and males develop and are formed in one of the central institutions of our society, the family, and the ways in which these processes produce individuals whose psychic structures are adapted through differential needs, defenses, and capacities to reproduction of the institutions which formed them. She thus addresses a central issue in the social sciences—the dialectical relationship between individual selves and social structures. Unlike traditional theories about this process, she explicitly recognizes that selves are both female and male and that they occupy different locations in the social structure. This recognition has enabled her to provide a more complete and realistic account.

The form of the enterprise is not new to sociology. As Chodorow herself says, she is working within a tradition of questions about the relationship between the structure of society and the psychological development of the individual pioneered by Parsons and by critical theorists of the Frankfort school. Unlike her predecessors, however, her work is genuinely psychological: her focus is on psychic structures and processes within individuals, and this psychological level receives much more detailed, theoretically informed, and subtle discussion than is the case in previous sociological writings.

Yet she has done what few psychologists in traditional academic and reseach settings have attempted. She offers an account of the differential psychological development of distinct social groups and does so in terms of supposedly universal psychological processes embedded in and modified by historically particular social roles and structures. In a society where theory and practice embody different expectations of the two sexes, she argues, the primary caretakers under current social arran