Chodorow Critique

Chodorow Critique

  • Submitted By: gosver
  • Date Submitted: 10/28/2013 11:13 AM
  • Category: Book Reports
  • Words: 412
  • Page: 2
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Reflection Paper 3
Chodorow’s Theory
When reading Chodorow’s article and the subsequent related commentary, I felt many objections to what was being proposed. For example, in the opening paragraph Chodorow comments “Women tend to have closer personal ties with each other than men have, and to spend more time in the company of women than they do with men” – This is an assumption which cannot be made if one is to take gender matters seriously. It is not possible to use women as a general term when ‘women’ are very different in every culture and sub-culture.
Secondly, Chodorow comments on Benedek, Zilborg and Bakon’s proposition that “men often feel extremely jealous toward children”. Yet again, it is not possible to talk about men in such a general sense nor is it acceptable not to define more clearly what kind of jealousy they are assuming men feel towards children.
Thirdly, Chodorow continues to quote Deutsch referring to women as thinking “I want a child with him” versus men thinking “I want a child”. Yet again we see the problems I have mentioned above and this assumption also poses the problem of the impossibility of knowing others thoughts.
Moving onto Janneke’s review, I found this saturated in gender division. Janneke speaks about her female students expecting to be mothered in comparison to her male students, but, she does not consider that it is possible that her view of herself as a mother, potential desire to be a mother and preconceived notions of female behaviour may be affecting her interpretation of the female students behaviour rather than there being an actual difference.
My next contention is related to Orbach’s comment – “While men are important to adult heterosexual women, this relationship of depends on the presence or the intensity of a continuing close relationship with another woman”. How exactly might this hypothesis be tested?
Personally, I find Chodorow’s theory and subsequent commentary to be quite archaic, somewhat similar...

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