The Women Father Men Mother

    Nancy Chodorow, in her book The Reproduction of Mothering, investigates the idea of women coming to mother. Originally, it was natural for women to mother children due to physical and biological reasons, but those factors are long gone and the idea of a separate home and workplace is now created. There is a sex-gender divide among men and women, where men take a masculine and dominant role in the house while women tend to be mothers to adhere to the structural formalities of the time. Now men are beginning to wish for a closer connection to their children while women look to enter the work force. In the end, Chodorow calls for an end to sexual inequality, which I feel is a strong push in the right direction, and something that is easily obtainable. We are seeing more and more couples with two working jobs in different fields while splitting parenting duties between them, and nobody makes a big deal out of them. It would've been rare to see this scenario in the recent past, but the times have changed and the roles of a separate house and workplace should and are on their way to disappearing.
   This separation of a mother and father figure is represented in Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved. In this novel, the main mother figure, Sethe, is met by the main father figure, Paul D, towards the start of the book. Immediately Paul D has no intentions of connecting with the two daughters of Sethe, Denver and Beloved, and is looking for a job in the area to support their family. Although Sethe has a job at the nearby diner, she is expected to also run the house back at home by herself, which is an impossible task. Until Beloved arrives in the family in a physical form, Denver is forced to be an individual without any real substantial connection to Sethe and goes to her Boxwood forest to find herself. Yet the mothering torch is thrown into Denver's hands once Beloved takes over all of Sethe's time, and she finds help by going to the community and asking for support at first. Yet later on, she goes out to find steady work and is only temporarily at the house, so that once Paul D arrives back home, his need to be a father figure is dissolved and he must take care of the child in this situation i the form of Sethe.