Parenting, as an unpaid occupation outside the world of public power, entails lower status, less power, and less control of resources than paid work.

She spent many years as a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California Berkeley. She has written a number of influential books including The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978);Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989); Femininities Masculinities Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (1994); and The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis Gender and Culture (1999). She is widely regarded as a leading psychoanalytic feminist theorist and is a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association often speaking at its congresses.