Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Gaddis: Diplomacy

"A first step toward invigorating the field of American diplomatic history, then, might be to get beyond the tendency to equate synthesis with reductionism. The purpose of a synthesis, after all, is not to exclude but rather to account for complexity." (410)

A second area in which American diplomatic history lacks methodological sophistication has to do with what is, in a way, the opposite of reductionism: it is the tendency to construct a complex and multifaceted series of events, full of causes intersecting and individuals interacting, but then apply it an indiscriminate way. It is what one might call the "crop-duster" approach to history." (410)

"Weakens her analysis by concluding that the resulting policy - which she calls 'liberal-developmentalism' - allowed the United States to dominate those coutnries subjected to it in such a way as to constrict their political, economic, and cultural autonomy." One must be sensitive to its application, recognizing the virtual certainty that consequences will vary from place to place and from time to time.

"Somehow Americans affect what happens to other nations and peoples, but other nations and people seldom affect what happens to Americans."

Does the existence of acknowledged disparities in political, economic, or military power in fact cause influence to flow only from areas of strength to those of weakness? - A comparative study of empires.

These trends make all the more conspicuous, then, the tendency of American diplomatic historians to assume the unidirectional influence when they write about Latin America." Move away from dependency theory where political, economic, and social conditions in the Third World can only be understood within the framework of an international system dominated by mature capitalist economies.

A third problem that causes American diplomatic history to suffer from methodological impoverishment is cultural and temporal parochialsim: we assume the experience of the United States in time and space is unique and therefore defining - experiences of other nations at other times and in other parts of the world shed little useful light upon our own.

Attention to how policymakers think about space and time might help in dealing with such issues. Perceptions after all are to a large part shaped by the spatial and temporal context within which individuals and nations exist. Overcoming spatial and temporal parochialism requires being willing to undertake comparative studies. historians are not particularly receptive to this approach and tend to assume that the comparativist cannot know as much about a particular subject as the specialist.

The United States is and always has been a member of the great power system. America's contribution to international stability, American perceptions of fear, look at the domino theory.

For those who will seek out its patterns, history does have a certain - although limited - predictive utility. it is not like mathematics or chemistry, where the repeated combination of variables in the same amounts and under the same conditions will always produce the same result. It certainly is not, in and of itself, a gudie to the future: those who have sought to use history in this way - by assuming that the future will replicate the past - can count on only two certainties, which are that it will not and they will be surprised as a consequence.

History like a rear-view mirror. History can also make one aware of those long-term patterns that tend to hold up across time and space: that great powers do rise and fall; that empires do overextend; there is a relationship between solvency and secuirty; individuals not automatons; events complex.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Ferdinand de Saussure, "Course in General Linguistics"

Does not the grammatical organism depend constantly on the external forces of linguistic change? Whatever the merits of understanding the external environment, to say language cannot be studied from the inside is wrong. Changes in languages can be stuided simply by looking at the relation of one word with the other words inside a system. External linguistics adds detail to detail without being caught in the vice of a system. In internal linguistics, the picture differs dramatically as language is understood as a system that has its own arrangements, like a chess game where the number of pieces rather than what the pieces are made of is what is relevant.

SUBJECT MATTER AND SCOPE OF LINGUISTICS; ITS RELATIONS WITH OTHER SCIENCES:

Linguistics compromises all manifestations of human speech regardless of time or place. Linguistics seek to describe and trace the history of all observable languages which amounts to tracing the history of families of languages and reconstructing as far as possible the mother tongue of each. It should also try to understand universal and permanent forces at work in all languages and deduce general laws to which all historic phenomena can be reduced.

As opposed to history, language is merely a document. Anthropology only studies man as a species: language is a social fact.

Other sciences work with objects given in advance and that can be considered from different viewpoints, but linguistics differs in it is the viewpoint that creates the object, that the way the question is considered alters the outcome of any inquiry. Language is not to be confused with human speech, although the latter is a definite part of the former. Language is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. It is also a convention and the nature of the sign that is agreed upon does not matter. Language gives a unity to the study of social phenomena that others fail.

Among individuals linked together by speech, some sort of average will be set up where all will reproduce the same signs united with the same concepts. How does this come about? In separating language from speaking we are at the same time separating what is social from what is individual and what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental. Language is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual and never requires premeditation, and reflection enters only for the purpose of classification.

An individual act is willful and intellectual and distinguishing between combinations by which a speaker uses language to express thought and the psychological mechanism permitting him exteriorize those combinations.

Language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts. It can be localized in the limited segment of the speaking-circuit where an auditory image is associated with a concept. The social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create or modify it himself, exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community; an individual only acquires it through sustained assimilation. Language is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images and the associations which bear the stamp of collective approval are realities that have their seat in the brain.

Language is a unique social institution. As a system of signs that expresses ideas, it is the most important of all others. A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable as a part of social psychology and of general psychology. Semiology, the study of signs, illuminates what constitutes signs, what laws govern them.

IMMUTABILITY AND MUTABILITY OF THE SIGN:

No human agency in the production of a sign and what it represents. Language provides the best sign that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated rather than a rule to which all freely consent. No society knows any language other than that which was passed down to it by its ancestors. Nothing is explained by saying that language is something inherited and leaving it at that. Can not existing and inherited laws be modified from one moment to the next? The bigger question is how are other social institutions transmitted? We must first determine the greater or lesser amounts of freedom that the other institutions enjoy and then to discover why, in a given category, the forces of tradition carry more weight than those of free action. And why does history dominate the transmission of language?

Succeeding generations are fused with their ancestors. Speakers are also unconscious of the laws of language, and being unconscious, cannot exert agency to alter them, if they even wanted to them.

The arbitrary nature of a sign protects it from interference as people would find no point in arguing over which word works best for a concept. The sheer volume of signs in any language system also renders it immune to rapid change. A system can be grasped only through reflection as we are ignorant of it in our daily use. Imposing change from above will epically fail. Of all social institutions, language is the least amenable to initiative. The weight of collective inertia coupled with time renders all choice subject to arbitrary tradition.

Time wields another influence apparently contradictory to the first in explaining the rapid change of linguistic signs. A sign is proposed to alteration because it perpetuates itself, but what predominates in all change is the persistence of the old substance; disregard for the past is only relative. The principle of change is based on the principle of continuity. What predominates in all change is the persistence of the old substance. Unlike language, other human instituions are all based in varying degrees on the natural relations of things and all have of necessity adapted the means employed to the ends pursued. Language is limited by nothing in the choice of means, for apparently nothing would prevent the associating of any ideas whatsoever with just any sequence of sounds.

As it is a product of both the social force and time, no one can change anything about it, and on the other hand, the arbitrariness of its signs theoretically entaisl the freedom of establishing just any relationship between phonetic substance and ideas. Each of the two elements united in a sign maintains its own life to a degree unknown elsewhere: language evolves under the influence of all the forces which can affect either sounds or meanings.

Time changes all things. Language is a whole set of linguistic habits permitting an individual to understand be understood. This definition still leaves language outside its social context: the realization of language needs a community of speakers. Langugage never exists apart from a social fact. The linguistic sign is arbitrary for language as defined would therefore seem to be a system which is free and can be organized at will. It is not a purely logical basis that group psychology operates: one must consider everything that deflects reason in actual contacts between individuals. Time combined with social force is what prevents language from being altered.

STATIC AND EVOLUTIONARY LINGUISTICS:

Very few linguists suspect that the intervention of the factor of time creates difficulties peculiar to linguistics. Linguists, like economists, are concerned with a system for equating things of different orders, such as labor and wages. Language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms. A value, provided it is somehow rooted in things and in their natural relations as in economics, can to some extent be traced in time if we remember that it depends at each moment upon a system of coexisting values. Its link with things gives it, perforce, a natural basis, and judgments we base on such values are therefore never arbitrary; variability is limited. Natural data, of course, has no place in linguistics.

INNER DUALITY AND THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS:

Only by concentrating on one state can the linguist hope to comprehend change. The opposition between diachronic and synchronic studies of languages is absolute and allows no compromise. Everything diachronic in language is so only by virtue of speaking for it is in speaking that the germ of all change is found. It is launched by a certain number of individuals before it is accepted by general use. We are only aware of them until the community of speakers adopts their modifications as a whole. The history of any innovation there are always two distinct moments: where something sprang up in individual usage and when it became a fact of language, outwardly identical but adopted by the community. One looking synchronically at Old French cares not for tracing the history of a language from the thirteenth to the twelfth century. He works with similar facts in Bantu, Greek, or present day French. If each idiom is a closed system, then all idioms embody certain fized principles that the linguist meets again and again in passing from one to another. Historical study is no different for whether the linguist examines a definite period in the history of French or any language, everywhere he works with similar facts which he only need compare in order to establish the general truths of the diachronic class.

Thus, synchronic linguistics is concerned with the logical and psychological relations that bind together coexisting terms and form a system in the collective mind of speakers whereas diachronic linguistics will study relations that bind together successive terms not percieved by the collective mind but substituted for each other without forming a system,

LINGUISTIC VALUE FROM A CONCEPTUAL VIEWPOINT:

A word's value is its property of standing for an idea, but value differs from signification. Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others. Outside of langue, all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle: a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing which the value is to be determined and similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value s to be determined. A word can be exchanged for a dissimialar thing, an idea, while also being compared to something of a similar nature, a word. Value is not fixed so long as one simply states that it can be exchanged for a given concept: its content is really only fixed by the concurrence of everything that exists outside of it. It is endowed not only with a signification but also and especially with a value, and this is something quite different.

LINGUISTIC VALUE FROM A MATERIAL VIEWPOINT:

The important thing is not how a word sounds, but the phonic differences that make it possible to distinguish between a word from all others. Every language forms its words on the basis of a system of sonorous elements, each element being a clearly delimited unit and one of a number of fixed ones. Phonics are characterized not by their own positive quality, but by the fact that they are distinct.

THE SIGN CONSIDERED IN ITS TOTALITY:

In language there are only differences. A difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set u, but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas, but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of values and this system serves as the effective link between the phonic and psychological elements within each sign. Maintaining the parallelism between the two classes of differences is the distinctive function of the linguistic instittution.

The alteration of a word occasions a conceptual change and it is obvious that the sum of the ideas distinguished corresponds in principle to the sum of the distinctive signs. When two words are confused through phonetic alteration, the ideas that they express will also tend to become confused if only they have something in common. Comparing signs toward one another, we no longer speak of difference, the expression would not be fitting for it applies only to comparing two sound-images. Difference makes character just as it makes value and the unit.

SYNTAGMATIC AND ASSOCIATIVE RELATIONS:

In a language-state, everything is based on relations, but how do they function? Relations and differences between linguistic terms fall into two distinct groups, each of which generates a certain class of values. The opposition between the two classes gives a better understanding of the nature of each class. In discourse, words acquire relations based on the linear nature of language because they are chained together. A word acquires its value only because it stands in opposition to everything that precedes or follows it, or to both. Outside of discourse, words acquire relations of a different kind. Those having elements in common are associated in the memory, resulting in groups marked by diverse relations.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Levi-Strauss: The Structural Study of Myth

Anthropologists no longer study primitive religion, inviting amateurs to come into the mix. Crude psychological theories from Durkheim and others misapplied by their successors. Reducing psychological drives resulted in hampering of studies.

Nothing is more misunderstood than myths. Some claim human societies merely express through their mythology fundamental feelings common to the whole of humanity or attempt to provide an explanation for them which they otherwise fail to understand. Psychoanalysts and many anthropologists have have shifted the issue away from natural and cosmological toward sociological and psychological explanations: an evil grandmother in myth means an evil grandmother in society and the myth reflects ths social structure and social relations, or, perhaps an outlet for repressed feelings.

If the content of myth is contingent, then how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? Ancients tried to link the combination of sounds associated with meanings to a reason. It is the combination of sounds, not the sounds themselves, which provides significant data.

Myth is language for to be known it must be told. It is a part of human speech. In order to preserve its specifity, we must be able to show that it is both the same thing as language and also different from it. Myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place a long time ago, but the pattern is timeless: explaining the present and the past as well as the future.

Whatever our ignorance of the language or culture of a people, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere in the world for its substance does not lie in its style, its music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells. Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at taking off from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling.

Technique entails breaking down each myth indivudally, placing its story into short sentances, and cataloguing them. The problem with previous tudies has been the quest for the true version or an earlier one. If myth is made up of all its variants, structural analysis should take them all into account.

The function of repetition is to render the structure of the myth apparent. For we have seen that the synchronic-diachronic structure of the myth permits us to organize it into columns to be read synchronically. The structure of a myth comes to the surface through repetition. If the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming contradiction, an infinite amount of myths will be produced. The thought in myth is as rigorous as that of science, the difference lying not in the quality of the intellectual process but in the nature of the things to which it is applied.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Scribbled Notes

Ulrich: An improbable assembly of objects from different times, places, and sensibilities, as eclectic as a colonial revival house museum or a New England bed-and-break. Not meant to represent a moment in time. A memorial to the people who saved things.

How do ordinary people create meaning out of the world? Words cannot convey what really like, cannot recapture everything.

Introduction: History more than crimes, follies, and misdeeds: physical description of daily life. A democratic education? Hidden hand of history. Conventional narrative freezes out some in favor of another.

Idealizing women in the late nineteenth century justifies the new economic order. Distorted history. The silent work of ordinary people in the pat is like electricity, which, though unseen, goes through and masters thr world, holding all atoms to their places, and quickening even the life of our bodies. Electricity becomes historic only in a storm., though only by tunder. The historian must connect electricity to thunder. Objects nineteenth century Americans collected can help u do that by calling attention to the unseen technologies, interconnections, and contradictions that lie beneath events.

Undersrtanding what people collected reveals why they might have cared. No colonial dame ever wore a dress like hers. Different but a desire to associate with certain virtues. Vision of colonial America saturated in sentiment and encrusted with contradiciton, but they preserved artifacts and documents, rescued old buildings, aroused public interest for historical institutions, revived dying arts, and stimulated new forms of scholarship, contributions too important to be forgotten and question too much with us to be left unchallenged.

Sheep and textile trade as important as guns for taking over America. Artifacts tell us mot when they are imbedded in the rich texture of local history. As a work of pastoral embroidery, the chimmneypiece is a reminder that idealizations of rural life predated the colonial revival. Deeper meaning related to poor kids in spining schools

Basket shifts attention away from the violence of late seventeenth century to our own generation’s hopes for multiculturalism.

Relying heavily on written textual sources limits our capacity to represent reality. All five senses in their intellectual affective, expressive, and communicative practices, with each providing different kinds of information with people creare unique and interchangeable forms in each of these sensorial domains. Objects ae also active agents in the production of history: crowns, scepters, etc make a monarch,

Lets people unable to write have a voice. Psyhcobabble, history would look different if you took objects seriously. The use of material culture for the writing of history entails the use of both theoretical or conceptual work that addresses the relation between people and things in the abstract, that focuses on those relations under particular forms of economy and polity. It also requires careful reflection on the relation of texts and things, how people have represented their object worlds in writing or used textual invocations of objects. In this domain, it is literary scholars who provide the greatest assistance.

Wartime austerity kind of caused it, but lets infer this as well:
Can’t establish with certainty, but it is likely that many objects reflect the convictions of their makers.
“Artisans would not, however, have made these goods if no one wanted to buy them. But who would want such things? Although they were far less luxurious than furnishings and decorative items from the late Old Regime or the Directory, the purchase of such durable and encumbering, yet fragile, items in the middle of revolutionary upheaval suggests both means and a very powerful commitment to republican principles. . . . Consumers could have simply continued using their pre-Revolutionary domestic goods. It would appear, therefore, on the basis of the evidence of material culture that at least some French citizens took the politicization of everyday life further than did those writing law and political tracts, making their domestic interiors stylistically compatible with the political moment in which they were participating.

So what?

Friday, November 14, 2008

paper proposal

In writing my undergraduate thesis, nothing proved more vexing than the lack of attention most senators have attracted from historians examining the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Given the number of orations he delivered on behalf of the Cubans before the war, no omission appears more glaring to a researcher employing the Congressional Record than William E. Mason’s. A freshly elected Republican from Illinois, Mason attracted national attention for his eloquent pleas for a crusade against Spanish barbarity and tyranny in 1897. Unlike the chorus of populist voices also clamoring for intervention, he had no partisan interest in embarrassing the administration, indeed, Mason, according to a colleague, was an old friend of President McKinley’s from their time in Congress together who exploited that connection for patronage appointments. Yet Mason jeopardized that relationship, and his standing inside the Republican Party, with his Cuban position as well as votes on trusts, agrarian interests, and opposition to colonial rule in the Philippines. Recent work by several political scientists investigating Senate have sourced the lack of party cohesion prior to 1913 as the product of high turnover in state legislatures in the six year periods between elections: senators seeking to retain office needed to anticipate how factions would form in those parochial bodies. Other work has pointed to the deadlock between parties in the 1890s as the moment when party discipline began assuming its present form. I will not contend Mason had any real impact on the war nor argue that he held any sway in Washington. I do hope a preliminary examination of the Senator’s papers, kept at the Lincoln Presidential Library, alongside the local political context supplied by the Chicago Tribune, and the day-to-day political beat-writing Washington Post and Star, will aid me in discovering what pressures, if any, influenced Mason’s actions. Such a project may prove useful for future studies examining voting behavior in the late nineteenth century as well as enrich our understanding of the belligerent strand of political opinion in the 1890s.
Few presidents were so dissimilar in executive style and personality than Grover Cleveland and his successor. Much of the literature on Cleveland’s tenure, especially his second term, has praised him for his “honesty” and “courage” for opposing agrarian radicals in his party on grounds of principle rather than political expediency. There is much in Cleveland’s correspondence and papers to validate this assessment, but few have connected the rise of populism in the Democratic ranks to a series of politically maladroit actions by Cleveland in 1893-1894. By contrast, President McKinley is frequently damned as “weak” and “indecisive” because he deferred to a party opinion contrary to his own on many occasions, which permitted him greater control over the outcome of a policy. I am, of course, grossly oversimplifying, but I believe an examination of the means by which Cleveland and McKinley sought to control the nation’s diplomacy with Spain over Cuba could yield a more nuanced understanding of the powers of the nineteenth century executive, the conditions upon which he could go against Congress and his party, and the degree, or lack thereof, to which the character or temperament of the executive impacts the course of events. To make this project manageable, I would focus on the conditions surrounding two overlooked resolutions in Congress surrounding the Cuban question and examine how Cleveland and McKinley responded to attempts by congressmen to subvert their autonomy in diplomatic negotiations with Spain in April 1896 and May 1897 respectively. Presidential papers, the major Washington newspapers, State Department documents, and the Congressional Record should provide a good start for this project.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Psychoanalytic Perspective Notes

Pioneered by Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalytic perspective is unique in that it constructs its perspective independent of all the other traditions in the social science. Building on his experience as an experimental biologist, Freud employs dominant evolutionary themes, including his strongest claim that people are organisms and that the physical human body is the first point of contact with reality and remains in constant dialogue with it. All other understandings of social structures and phenomena are thus incomplete.

Educated in gymansium, Freud was also inspired by the German humanist tradition and employs linguistics, art, poetry, and literature in his work, as well as utilitarian models from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill that human behavior is driven by a primal psyche driven around the pleasure principle. In this sense, he breaks with Marx and other materialists in asserting that human ideologies are not completely rooted in economic conditions but are products of tradition and the past as displayed in the replication of the superego from parent to child. But to understand that past, as well as human experience, social structures, language, a researcher must examine how the construction of the psyshce is itself a product of historical and social functions.

Society, for Freud, is the human psyche, which translate better as the soul or mind. The individual may be the methodological unit of analysis, the purpose of psychoanalysis is to generate an understanding of that individual's soul's construction, which requires a dialogue with the dominant cultural and economic structures of the period. External reality is only made known to us through subjective reality, which is something of another order that cannot be merely understood as the product of external or social reality.

Culture and society are thus composed of institutionalized compromise formations, collective defense mechanisms, shared projections and sublimations that both express and manage the necessary and universal conflicts of human life, especially in its unconscious dimensions.

Human nature, conflict, sturggle, etc are not just the infinite desires and finite resources explained by utilitarians, but the product of repressed unconscious with further implications of persistence of all stages of life in psychic reality, including childhood and of intrapsychic conflict.

All of our social behavior is contingent upon a heretofore unacknowledged social reality. Consciousness is a sense organ, preconsciousness is comprised of an attention processor, memory banks, and censor. The unconscious mind is not directly accessible, knows not time, does not know the world no, the contents of which are universal biological drives plus repressed memories and voices.

Transference is the process through which we are able to jump from one system to the next: your capacity to recall on command the capital of certain states or countries is the result of lessening any extneral pressures blocking the way as well as any internal stumbling blocks. The unconscious is inaccessible to the conscious mind because of repression barriers which are the product of an internal conflict forcing a stream of psyhic energy to block our capacity to recall or summon certain impulses or memories. To make the unconscious conscious requires a method of overcoming those barriers.

Unconscious thinking has peculiar characteristics and properties: it is filled with energy from biological instincts for which neither logic nor negation apply. The psychoanalytic project is one through which we seek to build a model of the mind to explain and organize empirical observations.

Freud's earliest model had the ego, superego, and id as a system of places but he scrapped it due to overlapping aspects of unconsciousness in the ego and superego. Repression is the quantom of psyhic energy split off and used to put up a barrier between it and consciousness.

We can not understand the psyche except through inferring its structure from its effects. This is no different than social life for we infer without knowing personalities, backgrounds, etc based on behavior. It is like understanding how a camera works by only glancing at the lens.

Free association is critical for analysis as only when one relaxes the guards of the gates of reason and allow thoughts to arise pell mell can we hope to penetrate events suppressed into the unconscious. This may lead to chaos, but nothing that is said is purely random. Symptoms of socially degenerate behavior have a meaning in terms of an individual's life as well as typical conditions.

How does one go from free association to theory? Well, the interpretation of dreams, symptoms, jokes, and slips of tongue are meaningful ways of viewing the unconscious. We know our interpretation is correct when the person in therapy gets better and the free association and other data points provide sources of evidence.

Clinical data forms the basis of findings, but for judgments of society as a whole we can turn to the aforementioned dreams, jokes, and slips of tongue that are messages from the unconscious and taken together form the collective unconsciousness of a whole set of people.

And what is in that unconscious? Well, what it is to be a living creature, for starters, as drives are really just psychological expressions of instincts. This is a Hobbesian world view through which repression is necessary for society to function. The ego serves to negotiate between internal reality and the demands from external agencies. Social and cultural traditions are internalized super-egos passed down from an older set of super-egos.

Critics are many. The easy one is reduction of human behavior to sexual and bilogical drives. Another is that this is little more than crude utilitarianism and historians levy the same critiques fired at that field as reasoning by analogy supersedes knowing through a close examination of data. Another tautlogical fallacy is pretty apparent: you don't believe us, you're just repressed. The projective theory of culture also allows the observer too much power in defining the outside culture in his own terms. Also, tied to a worldview that was very early 20th century Jewish Vienna.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

The reproduction of mothering: psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender

Mothering is a universal and enduring element of the sexual division of labor and often taken for granted, which means issues relating to the relationship between mothering and family structure, relations between sexes, ideology about women, and the sexual division of labor and sexual inequality inside and outside of the family are rarely analyzed.

The actual physical and biological requirements of childbearing have decreased but the role of mother has gained psychological and ideological significance in determining women's lives. In the past, childbirth coincided with the household as a unit of production. But with the development of capitalism, home and family became separate things. Families became personal things, rather than productive roles in society. Women now took care of children and men. Women's mothering became less entwined with other ongoing work, it also became more isolated and exclusive. Fewer people live in contemporary homes and children leave earlier.

Women's emotional role in the fmaily and their psychological mothering grew just as their economic and biological role decreased. Mothering today is central for women's lives and social definition. Mothering is a central and constituting element in the social organization and reproducction of gender. Contemporary reproduction of mothering occurs through social strucutrally induced psychological processes, rather than biology or intentional role-training. Women's mothering reproducres itself cycically: daughters and sons are brought up in such a way to produce the division of psychological capacities which leads them to reproduce this sexual and familial division of labor.

The sex-gender system is like any society's dominant mode of production, a fundamental determining and constituting element of that society, socially constructed, subject to historical change and development, and organized in such a way that it is systematically reproduced.

The Psychodynamics of the Family:

An oedipally produced ideology and psychology that propels men into the nonfamilial competitive work world places structrual strains on marriage and family life. Families no longer serve productive, educative, religious, or hospitality functions as only psychological and personal functions bind it together. Boys have a straightforward oedipal relationship, girls are more complicated.

Men provide women with an opportunity to break with the mother, for this and other reasons, men are idealized, therefore men's limitations are denied as long as she feels loved. Due to the social organization of parenting, men operate on two levels in women's psyche. On one level they are emotionally seconadary and exclusively loved - are not primary love objects like mothers. Onanother, they are idealized and experienced as needed, but are unable either to express their own emotional needs or respond to those of women.

For women in love, they are economically dependent, thus it is a survival mechanism. Because men are all about the world, women need them. Women will romanticize economic decisions. Women also are elss dependent upon men for their emotional well-being and have a richer, ongoing inner world to fall back upon, and the men in their lives do not represent the insensity and exclusivity that women represent to men. Developmentally, therefore, men do not become as emotionally important to women as women do to men. Because women care for children, it has different meanings.

Women friendship stuff is the product of their relationship with men being unable to fulfill emotional needs. Only having a child with a man recreates the system for a woman. Women want to be loved or largely self-sufficient, they also want to love someone as an extension of themselves.

Women's mothering as a feature of social structure requires an explanation in terms of social structure. Behaviorialist methodologies are insufficient empircally for imparting these differences. Ongoing social structures include the means for their own reproduction - in the regularized reptition of social processes, in the perpetuation of conditions which require members' participation, in the genesis of legitimating ideologies and institutions, and in the psychological as well as physical reprorduction of people to perform necessary roles.

Psychoanalytic theory provides us with a theory of social reproduction that explains major features of personality development and the development of psychic structure, and the differential development of gender personality in particular. Personality results from and consists in the ways a child appropriates, internalizes, and organizes early experiecnes in their family - from the fantasies they have, the defenses they use, the ways they channel and redirect drives in their object-relational context. A person subsequently imposes this intrapsyhic structure, and the fantasies, defenses, and relational modes and preoccupations which go with it, onto external social situations. This reexternalization is a major constituting feature of sical and interpersonal situations themselves.