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Female Friendship: Contra Chodorow and Dinnerstein

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Janice Raymond
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Abstract

The author critiques two widely-used works in Women's Studies for their hetero-relational content and the ways in which they minimize the necessity for affinities between women. Dinnerstein and Chodorow give us in theory what movies such as Kramer vs. Kramer depict in the film. It is not co-parenting and the inclusion of the male in an equal parenting role that will remedy present “sexual arrangements,” without first giving attention to women's relations with each other.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 1 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Motherhood and Sexuality , Fall 1986 , pp. 37 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Hypatia, Inc.

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References

Notes

This article is adapted from my recent book, A Passion for Friends: A Philosophy of Female Affection (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).

1 Chodorow interprets Freud on this subject. Citing his essay on “Female Sexuality” (1931), she says: “Freud speaks to the way that women seek to recapture their relationship with their mother in heterosexual relationships. He suggests that as women ‘change object’ from mother to father, the mother remains their primary internal object, so that they often impose on their relation to their father, and later to men, the issues which preoccupy them in their internal relation to their mother. They look in relations to men for gratifications that they want from a woman” (Chodorow 1978, 194–95).

2 (Chodorow 1978, 194–95). Carrying this point further, one might cite Beauvoir's remarks about the insincerity of what I call hetero-relations.

Man and woman—even husband and wife—are in some degree playing a part before one another, and in particular woman, upon whom the male always imposes some requirement; virtue beyond suspicion, charm, coquettishness, childlishness, or austerity. Never in the presence of husband or lover can she feel wholly herself….(Beauvoir 1949, 394)

3 Given the fact that many men have no idea of, or training for, consistent and responsible parenting, women, having been enjoined to relinquish the primary mothering of children, may now find that they will have to “mother” men into male mothering.

4 I use the words “visible” and “immediate” purposefully. Mothers, while being the visible and immediate conduits of hetero-relations, are not the primary conduits.

Chodorow notes:

… from both psychoanalytic clinical reports and from social psychological research … fathers generally sex-type their children more consciously than mothers along traditional gender-role lines and … they encourage feminine heterosexual behavior in young daughters. (Chodorow 1978, 118)

However, fathers’ encouragement of hetero-relations is often less visible than mothers’ because the former are most often the distant and invisible parent.