1062 Joan w. Scoll ncluding history. Gilligans work draws on Chodorow's, although it is concerned less with the construction of the subject than with moral development and behavior. In contrast to the Anglo-American school, the French school is based on structuralist and post-structuralist readings of Freud in terms of theories of language(for feminists, the key figure is Jacques La Both schools are concerned with the processes by which the subject's identity is created; both focus on the early stages of child development for clues to the formation of gender identity. Object-relations theorists stress the influence of actual experience(the child sees, hears, relates to those who care for it, particularly of course, to its parents), while the post-structuralists emphasize the centrality of language in communicating, interpreting, and representing gender. (By"lan- guage, post-structuralists do not mean words but systems of meaning-symbolic orders-that precede the actual mastery of speech, reading, and writing. )Another difference between the two schools of thought focuses on the unconscious, which for Chodorow is ultimately subject to conscious understanding and for Lacan is not. For Lacanians, the unconscious is a critical factor in the construction of the subject; it is the location, moreover, of sexual division and, for that reason, of continuing tability for the gendered subject In recent years, feminist historians have been drawn to these theories either because they serve to endorse specific findings with general observati because they seen to offer an important theoretical formulation about gender Increasingly, those historians working with a concept of"women's culture"cite Chodorow's or Gilligan's work as both proof of and explanation for their interpretations; those wrestling with feminist theory look to Lacan. In the end neither of these theories seems to me entirely workable for historians: a closer look at each may help explain why. My reservation about object-relations theory concerns its literalism, its reliance on relatively small structures of interaction to produce gender identity and to generate change. Both the family division of labor and the actual assignment of tasks to each parent play a crucial role in Chodorow's theory. The outcome of prevailing Western systems is a clear division between male and female: "The basic feminine sense of self is connected to the world. the basic masculine sense of self is separate.+ According to Chodorow, if fathers were more involved in parenting and present more often in domestic situations, the outcome of the oedipal drama might be different. 2 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender(Berkeley alif.,1978),16i 2)My account suggests that these gender- related issues may be influenced during the period of the oedipus complex, but they are not its only focus or outcome. The negotiation of these issues occurs in the context of broader object-relational and ego processes. These broader processes have ition, and psychic life and relational mod hey account for differing modes of identification and dese to heterosexual objects, for the more asymmetrical oed outcomes, arise from the asymmetrical organization of parenting, with the mother's role as pr arent and the father's typically greater remoteness and his tment in socialization espec reas concerned with gender-typing "Chodorow, Reproduction f Mothering,166. It is important that there are differences in interpretation and approach between Chodorow and British