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MOTHERING, MALE DOMINANCE, AND CAPITALISM

Nancy Chodorow

Women mother. In our society, as in most societies, women not only bear children. They also take primary responsibility for infant care, spend more time with infants and children than do men, and sustain primary emotional ties with infants. When biological mothers do not parent, other women, rather than men, take their place. Though fathers and other men spend varying amounts of time with infants and children, fathers are never routinely a child’s primary parent. These facts are obvious to observers of everyday life.

Because of the seemingly natural connection between women’s childbearing and lactation capacities and their responsibility for child care, and because of the uniquely human need for extended care in childhood, women’s mothering has been taken for granted. It has been assumed to be inevitable by social scientists, by many feminists, and certainly by those opposed to feminism. As a result, the profound importance of women’s mothering for family structure, for relations between the sexes, for ideology about women, and for the sexual division of labor and sexual inequality both inside the family and in the nonfamilial world is rarely analyzed.

A Note on Family and Economy

Uniquely among early social theorists, Frederick Engels divided the material basis of society into two spheres, that of material production and that of human reproduction.¹ He argued that the two spheres together determined the nature of any particular society. Engels makes clear that he does not think these aspects of social life develop or express themselves in biologically self-evident or unmediated ways, for he equates each with their respective social forms—the production of the means of existence with labor, and the production of people with the family.

Anthropologist Gayle Rubin, in an important recent contribution to the development of feminist theory,² pushes further Engels’ conception that two separate spheres organize society, and she reforms and expands it in an even more sociological vein. Marx and Marxists, she points out, have convincingly argued two things about any society’s organized economic activity, its “mode of production.” One is that this activity is a fundamental determining and constituting element (some would say the fundamental determining and constituting element) of the society. The second is that it does not emanate directly from nature (is, rather, socially constructed), nor is it describable in solely technological or mechanically economic terms. Rather, a mode of production consists of the technology and social organization through which a society appropriates and transforms nature for purposes of human consumption and transforms the experience of human needs to require further manipulations of nature.

Rubin suggests, in an analytic system parallel to this Marxian view, that every society contains, in addition to a mode of production, a “sex-gender system”—“systematic ways to deal with sex, gender, and babies.”³ The sex-gender system includes ways in which biological sex becomes cultural gender, a sexual division of labor, social relations for the production of gender and of gender-organized social worlds, rules and regulations for sexual object choice, and concepts of childhood. The sex-gender system is, like a society’s mode of production, a fundamental determining and constituting element of society, socially constructed, and subject to historical change and development. Empirically, Rubin suggests, kinship and family organization form the locus of any society’s sex-gender system. Kinship and family organization consist in and reproduce socially organized gender and sexuality.

We can locate features of a sex-gender system and a mode of production in our own society. In addition to assigning women primary parenting functions, our sex-gender system, as all systems to my knowledge, creates two and only two genders out of the panoply of morphological and genetic variations found in infants, and maintains a heterosexual norm. It also contains historically generated and societally more specific features: its family structure is largely nuclear, and its sexual division of labor locates women first in the home and men first outside of it. It is male dominant and not sexually egalitarian, in that husbands traditionally have rights to control wives and power in the family; women earn less than men and have access to a narrower range of jobs; women and men tend to value men and men’s activities more; and in numerous other ways that have been documented and redocumented since well before the early feminist movement. Our mode of production is more and more exclusively capitalist.

That our society contains a mode of production and a sex-gender system does not differentiate it from previous societies or from current nonindustrialized societies. The ease with which we can recognize the distinction between the two spheres, however, is a product of our own unique history, during which material production has progressively left the home, the family has been eliminated as a productive economic unit, and women and men have in some sense divided the public and domestic spheres between them. The distinction that we easily draw, however, between the economy (“men’s world”) and the family (“women’s world”), and the analytic usefulness in our separation of the mode of production and the sex-gender system, does not mean that these two systems are not empirically or structurally connected. Rather, they are linked (and almost inextricably intertwined) in numerous ways. Of these ways, women’s mothering is that pivotal structural feature of our sex-gender system—of the social organization of gender, ideology about women, and the psychodynamic of sexual inequality—that links it most significantly with our mode of production.

Women’s Mothering and the Social Organization of Gender

Women’s mothering is a central and defining structural feature of our society’s organization of gender, one that it has in common with all other societies. Over the past few centuries women of different ages, classes, and races have moved in and out of the paid labor force as the demand for workers has shifted and the wage structure varied. Marriage and fertility rates have fluctuated considerably during this same period. When there have been children, however, women have cared for them, usually as mothers in families and occasionally as workers in childcare centers or as paid or slave domestics.

There are few universal statements we can make about the sociology of the sexes, about the sexual division of labor, about family structure and practices. Margaret Mead early pointed to the unexpected malleability and variability of temperaments between and among the sexes in different societies.⁴ Since then, ethnographic research has confirmed Mead’s claim and has enabled us to extend it to include most of the activities we normally characterize as masculine or feminine.

This variation is not limitless, however.⁵ A few features of our own sexual division of labor and kinship system remain which we can tentatively characterize as universal. (Very importantly, all societies do have a sexual division of labor.) These include women’s involvement in routine daily cooking for their immediate families (festive cooking, by contrast, is often done by men) and heterosexuality as a sexual norm and organizational principle of family organization and the structure of marriage. In addition, where hunting of large animals and war-making take place, these activities are masculine specializations.

Finally, we find universally that men with full adult status do not routinely care for small children, especially for infants. Women care for infants and children, and when they receive help, it is from children and old people. That women perform primary parenting functions, then, is a universal organizational feature of the family and the social organization of gender. In different periods and societies there are substantial differences in family and kinship structure and in the specific organization and practices of parenting (such as the number of people who provide infant and child care, the family setting in which this is provided, the ideology about mother-infant relationships and about children, whether infants are swaddled, carried on hip, back or breast, kept mainly in cribs, etc.). These variations should not be minimized. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind their common status as variations within a sexual and familial division of labor in which women mother. Anthropologists have spoken of the universal, or nearly universal, ways that women’s mothering affects other aspects of women’s lives, the sexual division of labor, and the ideology and practice of sexual asymmetry in any society. Their insights apply equally to our own society and enrich our understanding of the dynamics of our own social organization of gender.

In all societies there is a mutually determining relationship between women’s mothering and the organization of production. Women’s work has been organized to enable women to care for children, though childbirth, family size, and child-tending arrangements have also been organized to enable women to work.⁶ Sometimes, as seems to be happening in many industrial societies today, women must care for children and work in the labor force simultaneously.

Historically and crossculturally, women’s mothering has become a fundamentally determining feature of social organization. Michelle Rosaldo has argued that women’s responsibility for child care has led, for reasons of social convenience rather than biological necessity, to a structural differentiation in all societies of a “domestic” sphere that is predominantly women’s and a “public” sphere that is men’s.⁷ The domestic sphere is the sphere of the family. It is organized around mothers and children. Domestic ties are particularistic—based on specific relationships between members—and often intergenerational, and are assumed to be natural and biological. The public sphere is nonfamilial and extra-domestic. Public institutions, activities, and forms of association are defined and recruited normatively, according to universalistic criteria in which the specific relationships among participants are not a factor. The public sphere forms “society” and “culture”—those intended, constructed forms and ideas that take humanity beyond nature and biology. And the public sphere, therefore “society” itself, is masculine.

Societies vary in the extent to which they differentiate the public and the domestic spheres. In small hunter and gatherer bands, for instance, there is often minimal differentiation. Even here, however, men tend to have extra-domestic distribution networks for the products of their hunting, whereas what women gather is shared only with the immediate family.⁸

The structural differentiation between public and domestic spheres has been sharpened through the course of industrial capitalist development, producing a family form centered on women’s mothering and maternal qualities. In precapitalist and early capitalist times, the household was the major productive unit of society. Husband and wife, with their own and/or other children, were a cooperative producing unit. A wife carried out her childcare responsibilities along with her productive work, and these responsibilities included training girls—daughters, servants, apprentices—for this work. Children were early integrated into the adult world of work, and men took responsibility for the training of boys once they reached a certain age. This dual role—productive and reproductive—is characteristic of women’s lives in most societies and throughout history. Until very recently, women everywhere participated in most forms of production. Production for the home was in, or connected to, the home.

With the development of capitalism, however, and the industrialization that followed, production outside the home expanded greatly, while production within the home declined. Women used to produce food and clothing for the home. Cloth, and later food and clothing, became mass-produced commodities. Because production for exchange takes place only outside the home and is identified with work as such, the home is no longer viewed as a workplace. Home and workplace, once the same, are now separate.⁹

This change in the organization of production went along with and produced a complex of far-reaching changes in the family. In addition to losing its role in production, the family has lost many of its educational, religious, and political functions, as well as its role in the care of the sick and aged. These losses have made the contemporary nuclear family a quintessentially relational and personal institution, the personal sphere of society.¹⁰ The family has become the place where people go to recover from work, to find personal fulfillment and a sense of self. It remains the place where children are nurtured and reared

This split between social production, on the one hand, and domestic reproduction and personal life, on the other, has deepened the preindustrial sexual division of spheres. Men have becone less and less central to the family, becoming primarily “bread-winners.” They maintained authority in the family for a time, but as their autonomy in the nonfamilial world decreased, their authority in the family itself has declined,¹¹ and they have become increasingly nonparticipant in family life itself. Psychoanalyst and social theorist Alexander Mitscherlich speaks of “society without the father.”¹² Women lost their productive economic role both in social production and in the home.

This extension and formalization of the public-domestic split brought with it increasing sexual inequality. As production left the home and women ceased to participate in primary productive activity, they lost power both in the public world and in their families. Women’s work in the home and the maternal role are devalued because they are outside of the sphere of monetary exchange and unmeasurable in monetary terms, and because love, though supposedly valued, is valued only within a devalued and powerless realm, a realm separate from and not equal to profits and achievement. Women’s and men’s spheres are distinctly unequal, and the structure of values in industrial capitalist society has reinforced the ideology of inferiority and relative lack of power vis-à-vis men which women brought with them from preindustrial, precapitalist times.

At the same time, women’s reproductive role has changed.¹³ Two centuries ago marriage was essentially synonymous with childrearing. One spouse was likely to die before the children were completely reared, and the other spouse’s death would probably follow within five years of the last child’s marriage. Parenting lasted from the inception of a marriage to the death of the marriage partners. But over the last two centuries, fertility and infant mortality rates have declined, longevity has increased, and children spend much of their childhood years in school.

Women’s Mothering and Ideology about Women

Just as the actual physical and biological requirements of childbearing and child care were decreasing, women’s mothering role gained psychological and ideological significance and came increasingly to dominate women’s lives, outside the home as well as within it. In this society it is not assumed, as it has been in most societies previously, that women as mothers and wives do productive or income-producing work as part of their routine contribution to their families. The factual basis for this assumption is fast being eroded—as the number of wives and both married and single mothers in the paid labor force soars—but the ideology remains with us. Whatever their marital status and despite evidence to the contrary for both married and unmarried women, women are generally assumed to be working only to supplement a husband’s income in nonessential ways. This assumption justifies discrimination, less pay, layoffs, higher unemployment rates than men, and arbitrary treatment. In a country where the paid labor force is more than 40 percent female, many people continue to assume that most women are wives and mothers who do not work. In a situation where almost two thirds of the women who work are married and almost 40 percent have children under eighteen, many people assume that “working women” are single and childless.

The kind of work women do also tends to reinforce stereotypes of women as wives and mothers. This work is relational and often an extension of women’s wife-mother roles in a way that men’s work is not. Women are clerical workers, service workers, teachers, nurses, salespeople. If they are involved in production, it is generally in the production of nondurable goods like clothing and food, not in “masculine” machine industries like steel and automobiles.¹⁴ All women, then, are affected by an ideological norm that defines them as members of conventional nuclear families.

This ideology is not merely a statistical norm. It is transformed and given an explanation in terms of natural differences and natural causes. We explain the sexual division of labor as an outgrowth of physical differences. We see the family as a natural, rather than a social, creation. In general, we do not see the social organization of gender as a product or aspect of social organization at all. The reification of gender, then, involves the removal of all imputation of historicity and all sense that people produce and have produced its social forms.

An ideology of nature that sees women as closer to nature than men, or as anomalies neither natural nor cultural, remains fundamental.¹⁵ In our society, moreover, the particular ideology of nature that defines the social organization of gender generally, and women’s lives in particular, bases itself especially upon interpretations and extensions of women’s mothering functions and reproductive organs. Historians have described how industrial development in the capitalist United States relegated women to the home and elevated their maternal qualities, as nurturant supporters and moral models for both children and husbands. Ruth Bloch has examined American magazines from the latter part of the eighteenth century to trace the origins of this nineteenth-century ideology.¹⁶ During the late colonial period, magazines assigned no special weight to the role of mother, either in relation to women’s other roles or in contrast to the role of father. Women were rational mothers, part of a rational parenting pair, along with their other housewifely duties. Around 1790, however, in conjunction with the growth of increasingly impersonal competitive work engaged in by husbands, a sentimental image of the “moral mother” came to dominate and take over from previously dominant images of women—images Bloch calls the “delicate beauty” and the “rational housewife.” The moral mother incorporated some of the traits of her predecessors while giving these new meaning:

Like the rational housewife, she was capable, indispensable, and worthy of respect. Like the delicate beauty, however, she was wonderfully unlike men, intuitive as opposed to rational, and, therefore, also the subject of sentimental idealizations.¹⁷

Magazines extolled the involvement and importance of mothers in the production of worthy sons. But they also suggested that women play a similar maternal role for their husbands. Bloch concludes:

This view of a man’s wife as providing him with crucial emotional support fed into a conception of woman as essentially “mother,” a role which in the magazines of the 1790s began to receive effusive praise for its indispensable and loving service to the human race.¹⁸

Thus, the virtues of mother and wife collapsed into one, and that one was maternal: nurturant, caring, and acting as moral model. This rising image of women as mother, moreover, idealized women’s sexlessness, pointing further to the assimilation of wife to mother in the masculine psyche.

The moral mother was a historical product. She “provided the love and morality which enabled her husband to survive the cruel world of men.”¹⁹ As this world grew crueler with nineteenth-century industrial development, both the image of the moral mother and attempts to enforce it grew as well. Barbara Welter describes its apogee in the “cult of true womanhood.”²⁰ Women’s magazines and books expounded upon this cult, and women discussed it in diaries, memoirs, and novels. Bourgeois women of the nineteenth century were expected to be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic—again, to provide a world of contrast to the immoral, competitive world of their husband’s work and a place where their own children (more especially their sons) could develop proper moral qualities and character. Because of this, compliance with the requisites of maternal morality was not left to chance. Medical practices defined bourgeois women as sexless and submissive by nature. They explained deviation from this norm (women’s resistance and assertions of self) as medically caused. Doctors, upon husbandly suggestion or on their own, extirpated sexual and reproductive organs of women who were too sexual and aggressive and who thereby threatened men’s control of women and the careful delineation of sexual spheres.²¹