Dorothy Dinnerstein

Who was Dorothy Dinnerstein?

Dorothy Dinnerstein was an American feminist academic and activist, best known for her book The Mermaid and the Minotaur, published in the UK as The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the World. Using some elements of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, particularly as developed by Melanie Klein, Dinnerstein argued that sexism and aggression are both inevitable consequences of childrearing's being left more or less exclusively to women; the issues intrinsic to a child's engagement with and separation from its mother, Dinnerstein thought, end up being conflated with gender relations. As a solution Dinnerstein proposed that men and women share equally in infant and child care.