Nancy Chodorow

Nancy Julia Chodorow was an American academic who held positions in sociology and clinical psychology, teaching at Wellesley College, the University of California Santa Cruz, and the University of California Berkeley, where she was a professor of sociology and clinical psychology until 2005, and later taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She was best known for applying and revising psychoanalytic theory to explain the social reproduction of gender, in works including The Reproduction of Mothering, which argued that patterns of mothering and gender identity are reproduced across generations through the structure of family life rather than through biology alone.