Education
York University, Ontario, 1966-1976.
York University, Ontario, 1966-1976.
Lecturer, Assistant, Associate, then full Professor of Sociology in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. 1976-1987.
O’Brien develops a feminist concept of‘reproduction' that replaces traditional social and political conceptions of history and culture. In The Politics °f Reproduction (1981), her theory of ‘reproduc- •tve consciousness’ revises Marx’s stages of human history. For women, childbirth constitutes a mediated dialectic’ which establishes continuity between individual and species. By contrast, men’s reproductive consciousness alienates them from species-continuity. The first stage of reproductive consciousness is the discovery of paternity ln which men seek to artificially establish speciescontinuity through ’potency principles’, that is. Primogeniture, legal rights and other institutions. The result is male domination and the relegation °f women to the private sphere. The second stage m the dialectic of gendered consciousness is reproductive technology, which is revolutionary m enabling women to choose parenthood. She has since argued that a third revolution, a radical transformation of the patriarchal state, is possible only by following a strategy dictated by a feminist s°cial theory. Although her ideas have strongly mfiuenced feminist thought, some feminists have suggestcd that her position leads to biological determinism. However, she claims that women’s reproductive consciousness is a social phenomenon despite its natural roots.