In brief
Dorothy Dinnerstein brought psychoanalysis down from the couch and into the kitchen. Reading Freud through Melanie Klein, she asked what happens to a culture when only women hold the baby.
Born on April 4, 1923 in the Bronx, Dinnerstein was raised in a Jewish community and was raised by her parents, Nathan Dinnerstein and Celia Moedboth, both progressive Jews.
The Mermaid and the Minotaur was not instantly fashionable. It remains a stubborn book: a feminist argument that the first classroom is the household, and that men belong there too.
