Ruddick, Sara

Early Philosophical Work

Trained as a philosopher, much of Ruddick's early work, published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, presents impassioned analyses of the ways in which philosophy, and in fact all academic disciplines, undermine their mission of revealing knowledge by constructing epistemological practices incompatible with innovative thought. According to Ruddick, academe loses its ability to truly “know” by divorcing reason from emotion, gendering these two ways of knowing, and then categorizing one as superior to the other. This process dichotomizes work and joy, and establishes elite institutions that exclude those seen as “other” because of race, class, gender or ethnicity.

In her 1977 book, Working It Out, edited with Pamela Daniels, Ruddick documents her own process of grappling with and gaining a foothold on these factors that make it difficult for outsiders of any stripe, especially women, to contribute to knowledge making. She also celebrates the freedom she found when she was finally able to embrace (with confidence and without guilt) what she terms “a work of one's own.”

In a second book, Between Women (1984/1993), Ruddick and coeditors Carol Ascher and Louise DeSalvo created a public, intellectual space where 25 women contributors expressed what they had learned from contemplating the work of women of significance to them, thereby demonstrating the power of thoughtful reflection and intimate woman-to-woman connections as mechanisms that foster movement toward greater authenticity. Ruddick's own essay in Between Women continues her reflections on the intersection of institutional barriers and personal inhibitions and their place in the formation of anxieties that hobble women's efforts to publicly offer insights on matters of significance. She chronicles her transcendence of such barriers and demonstrates how reclaiming an integrative connection between feeling and reason—so that one may inform the other—creates the basis for more enduring truth, and brings passion, care, love, and self into intellectual work.

Maternal Thinking

Ruddick arrives at these insights by weaving a path through the writings of Virginia Woolf, blending her own conflicts, derived from what she feels are patriarchy's restrictive definitions of womanhood, with Woolf's efforts to free herself from the confines created by the circumstances of her life and the mores of her time. Woolf's struggles to make meaning of her experiences as a daughter, combined with reflections on the connections Ruddick felt with her own mother and her experiences in raising her children, inform the insights on the impact of maternal engagement with children in Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1995).

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