Primary Femininity

In Freud's theory of the origins of femininity in females, there is a stage unaccounted for in the chronology of the little girl's development: the first many months of life are not considered. We know by now that castration anxiety, penis envy, and the traumas and frustrations of oedipal conflict are easy to demonstrate; but if the first stage in female development is different from Freud's description-if a fundamental, fixed sense of being rightfully a female is established in earliest childhood-then our psychology of women needs repair. The factors that make up this stage, with examples, are reviewed: (1) a biological "force": the effect of circulating fetal sex hormones on the brain of the fetus; (2) sex assignment: the announcement at the time of birth to the parents that they have had a boy or a girl (or a hermaphrodite); (3) parental attitudes: the effects of the sex assignment on parents, then reflected back onto the infant; (4) "biopsychic" phenomena: early postnatal effects caused by certain habitual patterns of handling the infant-conditioning, imprinting(?), or other forms of nonconflictual learning; (5) developing body ego: sensations, especially from the genitals, that define the child's dimensions. I suggest that one can divide the development of femininity in females into two phases, both of which lead to adult femininity, but each of which contributes in a different manner. The first, nonconflictual in origin, contributes a sense of femaleness and some of what allows for one's looking feminine; the second, the result of conflict, especially oedipal, produces a richer and more complicated femininity, not merely one of appearances, but one enriched by desires to perform with the substance, rather than just the façade, of femininity.