ABSTRACT
Economists see interdependence as a basic fact in the market, where the division of labor makes everyone dependent on others for goods and services to exchange for his own. But the psychologists who have used the term have had something else in mind. Women who have been reared for a position which, according to the old script, would be provided for, do not take preparation for economic independence seriously. In a time when most of the productive work a woman did was going to be done in the home, easily combined with motherhood, there was no conflict between economic dependence and psychological dependency. Only in times when a large part of a woman's productive work is done in the outside world does psychological dependency become a crippling handicap. There are, finally, costs of dependency in what Erik Erikson called the core of female identity, a "biological, psychological, and ethical commitment to take care of human infancy".
