F eminist and g ender t heories

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA
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As both a psychoanalyst and a sociologist, Chodorow can be said to incorporate both indi-
vidualistic and collectivistic approaches to order in her work, explicitly melding the more 
individualistic tradition of psychoanalysis with the more collectivistic tradition of sociology. 
Specifically, Chodorow explicitly combines an individualistic emphasis on the psychologi-
cal hurdles that a child must overcome in order to become an able “man” or “woman” with 
pathological exception to mostly harmonious family relations, “undermine the sex-gender 
system even while reproducing it” (Chodorow 1978:211).
This critical strain in Chodorow’s examination of the traditional family coincides with 
that of the Frankfurt School (see Chapter 3). Also inspired by Freud, the Frankfurt School 
described the central “strain” within the family as the masculine urge to dominate and 
oppress women. In conjunction with their Marxist roots (and in sharp contrast to functional-
ism), the Frankfurt School tied the disruptive effects in the family to the decline of paternal 
authority because of the spread of industrial capitalism.
Chodorow provocatively extends this Frankfurt School emphasis on the oppressive ele-
ments within the family structure by rooting the masculine urge to dominate women in the 
dynamics of psychosexual development. In other words, in contrast to the masculinist stand-
point of the Frankfurt School theorists (as well as functionalism), which emphasizes “the 
way the family and women socialize men into capitalist society” (ibid.:37; emphasis in 
original), Chodorow takes an explicitly feminist and psychoanalytic standpoint, replacing 
the study of paternal authority with a study of mothering and situating the root of the prob-
lem not in the capitalist economy, but in object relations (see Figure 7.4).