Nancy Chodorow

Nancy Chodorow is an American sociologist whose book The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) offered an influential structural account of why women, rather than men, come to do the great majority of parenting across generations in a wide range of societies. Drawing on object-relations psychoanalysis, she argued that because women are typically the primary caregivers of infants, girls develop a sense of self through continuous identification with the same-sex parent while boys must separate from it, producing systematically different relational capacities that lead women, as adults, to want to mother in turn, reproducing the same gendered division of family labor in the next generation without any single individual choosing or intending it. Read as an account of the social reproduction of the gendered family system, rather than only individual psychological development, Chodorow's argument became a foundational text of feminist sociology's approach to kinship, gender, and the family.