Nancy Chodorow (1978) later provided a more woman-centred alternative to the original Freudian understanding of the psychological differences between women and men. Chodorow shares the same framework as Freud but understands the development of femininity as a smooth process rather than as a kind of deviation from a male ‘normality’. Chodorow suggests that because women are usually the most important carer, all babies bond with them. As children grow older, boys realize that to be masculine means not being like their mother, so they have to make some sort of break with her in order to take on a masculine identity. Having to break this strong bond with the mother is difficult for boys and means they have to distance themselves emotionally. This emotional distance, according to Chodorow, is therefore part of being masculine and means men are not good at forming other close relationships. They achieve their identity through fragmentation and emphasizing discontinuity with others. Girls meanwhile realize they are like their mother and can continue to identify with her. As a result they have a much more continuous sense of identity, but they learn what it means to be feminine from their mother in her role as a mother. Other ways of being feminine tend to get ignored. Chodorow thinks that girls learn, most of all, that being feminine means nurturing and caring for others. Being feminine therefore becomes confused with being a mother and the only way girls really know how to be feminine is to act like a mother. This whole process means that effectively mothers are socializing their daughters into being mothers, and Chodorow calls this ‘the reproduction of mothering’.The reproduction of mothering can disadvantage women in a world that continues to value competitiveness, which requires separation from others rather than the practices of caring that women learn to see as central to their identity. Chodorow goes beyond Freud by challenging the idea that men are the standard to which women must be compared and she tries to explain, rather than
merely accepting, women’s inferior social position. Nevertheless, her explanation of gender differences still heavily relies, like Freud’s, on a rather simple story of how individuals learn to understand what it means to have a particular type of biological body. There has been considerable debate amongst feminist sociologists about the utility of psychoanalytic ideas.