Ruddick, Sara

Sara Ruddick, scholar, teacher, feminist, writer, and integrative thinker, provides in her work sophisticated and nuanced ways to think about matters of central importance to humanity such as peace, mothering, love, patriarchy, and violence. Ruddick's writings reflect her own movement toward authentic selfhood as she contemplates the place of meaningful work—including mothering—in the formation of the person, the transformative power inherent in connections with others, especially [Page 1089]women, and the imperative that everyone embrace peaceful ways of addressing the problems that wars are initiated mistakenly to solve. Her best-known book, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1989), describes how the demands of mothering changed her understanding of the process by which knowledge is achieved; her appraisal of the complex forms of cognition required for ...