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.