22
PARTISAN REVIEW
because none of the women as yet had explained why women continued
to remain in subordinate roles even as more opportunites had opened
up, psychoanalysis, however reluctantly, was brought back in.
Now, Nancy Chodorow started to investigate why even the most
emancipated women continue to mother their daughters in the way they
themselves had been mothered. She rediscovered Horney and Deutsch,
Klein and other object relations theorists (they focus on early mother–
child relations), and a number of Europeans, such as Juliet Mitchell,
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, and Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich,
whose radical premises appeared to match her own. Subsequently,
Chodorow criticized some of the Europeans' notions, along with those
of (superficial) American feminists, and demonstrated that Freud's judg–
ments about women belonged to his time but that psychoanalysis be–
longs to ours as well. Jessica Benjamin challenged Chodorow from inside
the movement by stressing that the girl's wish for autonomy and agency
is not so much a defensive reaction to males as an identification with her
mother. And Carol Gilligan (1982) explored women's voices as these de–
velop in infancy in response to mothers who, according to Freud, have
been deprived of a clear-cut Oedipal resolution. By the end of the
decade, the literary scholar Catharine Stimpson and the psychoanalyst
Ethel Person brought out an issue of the feminist publication,
Signs,
on
"Women: Sex and Sexuality"(1980), containing the best arguments by
the most serious feminists, including psychoanalytic contributions; and
Jean Bethke Elshtain (1981) chided feminists for having (falsely) attacked
Freud for misogyny. Freudian thought no longer was
non grata
within
feminism. But because by then feminists had to catch up with an enor–
mous and internally polemical body of work, they were as likely to start
reading a follower of Lacan's as Freud or Horney. This general widening
opened the door to feminists in all disciplines. Among them was Marks's
and Courtivron's selection of the earlier debates that had been raging
among Parisian feminists.
Unfortunately, American feminists were unaware of the fact that by
1980 most of the Parisian activists already had abandoned or lost interest
in this enterprise and were becoming therapists. Their typically French
rhetorical style, however, was being transplanted to American soil: in its
new idiom it promised a deliverance it could not deliver and thereby
roughly ended what I define as the First Wave of Feminism, and ushered
in the Second Wave. Around the same time postmodernism gained its
foothold. Its controversial mode, its refusal to synthesize differences into
uniform solutions, and to "privilege" history, was rooted in the same
milieu. However, postmodern opinions tended to go against notions of
progress (as assumed in modernism and its promises of continuous techni-
