Constructing Maternal Thinking

In this book Sara Ruddick brings to us the results of many years of mining a lode in which mainstream ethicists and many other feminists have shown little interest. Indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft held that—for reasons of “female education” and role—mothers were a morally reprehensible lot, sacrificing “Justice, truth, everything… for the sake of their own children … violating] the most sacred duties, forgetting the relationship that binds the whole family of earth together” ([1792] 1967, 226). What could such narrowly focused mothers possibly have to tell us about virtue, or indeed, about global peacemaking? In the first half of her book, Ruddick sets forth the virtues which she holds to be developed in the practice of mothering; in the second, she argues that these virtues, when transformed by a broader feminist standpoint, can aid one in working for peace. Her own experience of having a son nearing draft age in a militaristic society was transformative, as was my experience of tending a starving child in a Baloche camp in Pakistan. The mothers of Le Chambon left their hearths to help rescue Jewish children in 1942 because of their own religious convictions and history of oppression. A friend named Ruth has made her house a battered women's shelter, now that her own five children have grown. Such enlarging of the boundaries of maternal care must often come from the realization that the world of the fathers is not only unjust but violent to its young and their caretakers, and that this is simply intolerable.

Ruddick's work, then, not only leads one to reflect on one's own mothering (as daughter, mother, aunt, friend), but more importantly, leads that reflection into the public domain of ethical theory and political practice. Ruddick's is a normative, transformative vision of motherhood: a myth, grounded in her own experience and enriched by the work of many others, from which we can learn much and on the basis of which we can continue the dialogue. I hope to further this dialogue by asking three questions: 1) How can one possibly generalize about “mothers” or “maternal thinking” in the face of patent cultural diversity and class differences? 2) Does Ruddick's account of the virtues, ideals, and cognitive capacities arising from maternal thinking cohere with one's own reflective judgments? In particular, is anything missing from her account? 3) Is her account of the transformation of parochial mothering into maternal feminist peace work viable?

I. The Problemof Universalizing

The first question which must arise in any reader's mind is how Ruddick can possibly know, from her own limited experience, how all or most mothers think. Following Wittgenstein, Winch and Habermas she assumes that thinking “arises from and is shaped by the practices in which people engage” (9); what counts as reasonable within a practice is determined by its goals. So her judgments about what and how mothers think are based on “maternal practice.” However, the practices she cites to illustrate her method—horse racing and natural science—are patently more autonomous, more codified and less diverse than mothering. Though a jockey may ride in England, in Italy, or in the United States, the practice is substantially the same. A mother typically mothers only a few times, tied to place and culture.

Nonetheless, Ruddick defines a mother as one whose work is responding to the three basic demands all children present: preservation, nurturing growth, and training for social acceptability. While the father's role is said to be more variable, tied to differing cultural values, the mother's role is determined by these core needs. Though “needs” is here used uncritically, Ruddick does distinguish two senses of “demands”: the manifold, pre-critical demands children may make, and demands legitimated by a connection with the three basic goals. However, these demands have an elasticity that may be suspect. For instance, the child who is trained to be a Mafia avenger may find that training in conflict with his chances for survival, and for the Baloche mothers, the difficulty of mere survival may eclipse the goals of nurture and training.

Ruddick's own situation was privileged, not only in economic terms but in that her [male] spouse was her children's “egalitarian co-mother” (statistically atypical, as Ruddick notes). From that sexual domestic history, can she understand, for instance, the mothering practice of Morrison's Eva Peace? When her daughter asks, “Mama, did you ever love me?” she replies:

No, I don't reckon I did. Not the way you thinkin'… no time. They wasn't no time. Not none. Soon as I got one day done here come a night. With you all coughin' and me watching so TB wouldn't take you off and if you was sleepin quiet I thought, O Lord, they dead and put my hand over your mouth to feel if the breath was comin' What you talkin' about did I love you girl I stayed alive for you can't you get diat through your thick head or what is that between your ears heiferV (Morrison 1974, 67-9)

Though Ruddick is aware of the problem of generalizing from a limited perspective, her self-declared “epistemological restraint” is sometimes betrayed by her rhetoric, as in the following examples. First, “most mothers can't bring themselves to believe [in religion or mysteries]” (78); second, “because I am a mother I know the demoralizing, mind-numbing effects of sentimental descriptions of good mothering” (31). The connection between motherhood and agnosticism is not at all obvious, nor does one have to be a mother to understand the pernicious effects of sentimentalized conceptions of good mothering (indeed, this knowledge may constitute a part of the reason many women have chosen not to become mothers). A more serious error is her assertion that “all mothers are adoptive … and [committed] to protecting, nurturing, and training particular children” (51). While this may be true of good mothers, it is surely not true of all. In a related matter, Ruddick excludes from mothering the task of deciding whether or not to bring a child into a world in which its essential demands may be difficult to meet. But I would agree, for instance, with Sarah Hoagland that “mothering may also involve the choice not to bring a child into the world so long as society won't let a lesbian be the kind of mother she chooses to be” (1988, 96).

However, Ruddick might defend herself against charges of empirical inaccuracies by arguing that her project is normative, rather than simply descriptive of maternal practice. For Ruddick holds “to claim a maternal identity is not to make an empirical generalization but to engage in a political act” (50). On the assumption that she is setting forth an ethic rather than an ethnography of mothering, let us examine this ethic.

II. Maternal Virtues

Ruddick's account of the virtues and cognitive attitudes which should be developed in the practice of mothering includes both the virtues and their concomitant excesses, defects and perversions. The first need, preservation, requires reasonable control, which can lapse into anarchy or passivity, or turn into domination. It is enabled by humility, a knowledge of the limits of control and of the “independent, uncontrollable, and increasingly separate existences she seeks to protect” (71). Cheerfulness is also required to maintain the belief that one can keep children safe, in the face of chance, and one's own shortcomings. A key strategy is “holding,” a “characterological protectiveness” that minimizes risk and reconciles differences; its degenerate forms are timidity, holding too tight, and holding together relationships on which children depend, but which may be harmful. Ruddick notes that these, taken together, are virtues of oppression, but omits the related virtue of cooperation—uniting against oppression, to pool resources which individuals cannot muster. For mothers with limited resources, this virtue is lifesaving; for others, cooperation enables flourishing rather than merely surviving.

Ruddick holds that nurturing a child's developing spirit requires a recognition of the difficulty of the project, coupled with the assumption that natural processes “move toward health and integrity” (81), such that nature is a mother's ally so long as she cooperates with its purposes. But surely this teleology is undercut by any child's progressive physical or mental illness, or by the emergence of any trait which is deeply disapproved of by the mother, such as homosexuality. Leaving that point aside, administrative skills are developed in organizing social spaces and the home, which happily is not romanticized, but is “replete with the passionate rivalries, fears, disillusions and angers characteristic of childhood life” (88). It is on this battleground that the mother develops her abilities as peacekeeper.

The third and most problematic task is training a child to be the kind of person who will be accepted in the community and whom the mother can appreciate. This “training” is not mere conditioning, but “education,” in the sense of drawing out what is good in the child. Nature is again evoked: “children's natures, like a mother's own, can be seen as desiring the good”; are “led out of temptation” into the virtues “naturally” awaiting them (116). Ruddick goes on to castigate the inauthentic mother for living “the fascist moment of maternal life,” taking “her own children's and her own nature as an enemy… wills must be broken, desires subdued” (114). But surely not every child's “natural” impulses are good; the desire to maim the new baby must be subdued, or at least dealt with. Philosophically I cannot see how the concept of “nature” can do the work Ruddick expects of it.

However, Ruddick's discussion of “attentive love” and proper trust which it enables is incisive and important. And foreshadowing maternal peace work is the claim that training a child is a work of conscience, because the mother may judge against, as well as with, dominant values or persons. Powerless, she may have to speak truth to power, especially because her conscience becomes a model for the child's own. Ruddick holds that the self-questioning and articulation of the mother's own beliefs can be “invigorating,” but surely it can also be devastating when the rather holds criterial authority over this project.

III. Maternal Isolation, maternal Effacement

While Ruddick's account of maternal virtues seems essentially sound, her conception of the maternal agent is disturbing. She is isolated with her child(ren), in abstraction from other relationships, and she is faceless, turned toward the children. While one cannot deny that many mothers are in fact isolated, there seems no reason to take this as a norm. Many cultures view mothering as essentially communal, and the self-contained nuclear family as a moral aberration. Older siblings “mother” younger ones; a neighbor or aunt may have time to listen, when mother may not. As the child matures, a good mother hopes she will find others who will take over part of the work of nurture and training. Support groups for mothers of children with special problems help them realize that they are not alone; building co-mothering relationships with neighbors can save sanity, self-esteem, and perhaps a child's life.

For Ruddick, this maternal isolation is more than circumstantial; indeed, it is part of her conception of mothering. I follow Ann Ferguson in criticizing Ruddick's assumption that mother-child concerns are not seriously altered by relations to others around them—father, other children, or other adults (1983, 178). This isolation is hard, as Ruddick's story of a young woman with a bronchitis-ridden infant attests. She commends her for keeping her screaming child safe, for mastering her desire, over months, to do it harm, judging that the woman did all she could do to keep her child safe; what she did was enough. But was it? Mothering is a reciprocal relationship; she cannot keep her child safe unless she is safe herself. As Carol Gilligan puts it, “In order to be able to care for another, one must first be able to care responsibly for oneself (1982, 76).

Further, though Ruddick warns of the temptations to maternal self-sacrifice, the selfhood of the mother seems to be effaced in her task. As Jean Grimshaw puts it, Ruddick conceives of the mother as “essentially giving, responding, accepting, patient … focused on the welfare of the child. And there is something missing from the picture” (1986, 248). Only in Ruddick's description of training as a work of conscience, in which the mother may resist the institutions and values of the world around her, do we see her as a moral agent in her own right.

IV. From Privateto Public Peacemaking

A key achievement of this book is that it brings women's virtues into the public domain. But how does Ruddick get this mother out of the home and onto picket lines (or better, perhaps, missile sites)? The peacefulness “latent” in maternal practice may remain so, because of the narrow focus on her own family—a focus which, as Ruddick points out, may foster “the racialism in which war flourishes and the abstract hatreds and loyalties on which militarism depends” (251).

Mothers must acquire a “feminist consciousness,” in Sandra Bartky's words, “by apprehend[ing] certain features of reality as intolerable, as to be rejected in behalf of a transforming project for the future” (1977, 22, 34). This can happen, for instance, when a mother realizes that her own children will not be safe until all children are safe, that nuclear weapons and environmental poisons threaten us all.

Ruddick argues that maternal thinking about peacekeeping is clear and effective: 1) it is concrete, free from the abstraction and unrealistic postulation of equality involved in military and strategic thinking; 2) it is grounded in knowledge of the body, the promise of birth, and the reality of death; 3) it is long practiced in resistance, renunciation, reconciliation, and striving for peace as an active connectedness; 4) it has the ability to possess great power over the weak, without using it for destructive ends.

What Ruddick has to say about peacemaking is in large part corroborated by a report from the Feminism and Nonviolence Study Group of Devon, England, which discusses similarities between feminist and nonviolent methods of organizing peace resistance, including the sharing of skills and organizational tasks, decentralized decision-making and the breaking down of hierarchical structures (1983, 39). Like Ruddick, this group is concerned with identifying concrete peacemaking tasks, and, incidentally, refuting the myth of the “Women-as-Natural-Peacemakers” school. But unlike Ruddick, this group sees an essential connection between peace and justice, calling for a radical global redistribution of resources, resisting not only military but economic oppression.

Ruddick's maternal peace politics is, she says, one story, making a beginning which “like birth itself, revives human hopes as old and at least as indestructible as war” (251). Her remarkable book should provoke, and inform, the telling of many other stories.

Reservations which I have about whether this story can explain all maternal practice may be allayed when others tell their stories. But I should like to conclude with a warning about Ruddick's “imaginative collective” of mothers, feminists, and women in resistance, which has some affinity with the “imagined community of ultimate harmony and perfect agreement” of which Marilyn Frye writes. Frye and Ruddick both recognize that this mythical community is desired in order for us to go on, to make meaning in the world. Perhaps because of this affinity I believe that Frye's warnings are relevant to Ruddick's project.

This brings us into an arrogance of our own, for we make it a prerequisite for our construction of meaning that other women be what we need them to be to constitute the harmonious community of agreement we require. (Frye 1983, 81).

I share Ruddicks's hope that her efforts will stimulate other, different mothers to tell their stories, and that those stories will be mutually intelligible.