This chapter is based on a paradox that recurs repeatedly in feminist writ­ ings. It deals with one of the major puzzles in the establishment of gender identity: how it is that although young children experience the mother's role as all-powerful and important, little girls still grow up into young women who publicly carry through roles, activities, and talk that allow them to be placed in a secondary position. The paradox of this publicly demonstrated powerlessness was described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex:

If the little girl at first accepts her feminine vocation, it is not because she intends to abdicate; it is, on the contrary, in order to rule; she wants to be a matron because the matron's group seems privileged; but, when her company, her studies, her games, her read­ ing, take her out of the maternal circle, she sees that it is not the women but the men who control the world. It is this revelation­ much more than the discovery of the penis-that irresistibly alters her conception of herself. (quoted in Chodorow 1989)

Nancy Chodorow, in her work on the growth of gender identity and the reproduction of mothering, suggests that girls' gender identity has more conti­ nuity than boys' throughout childhood and into young adulthood. Yet, as she points out, girls' gender identity is more difficult to achieve because there is no clear break or choice of identification, which boys must make in switching from the loved mother to the competing but companionable father. Girls continue to identify with and support their mothers while entering into an alliance to attract their fathers (Chodorow 1976). Girls' understanding of the mother role is based in large part on their perception of everyday life where the activities of mothering surround them, a fact that is underlined by the child-rearing and family practices in many different societies.