Maternal Thinking

A term coined by Sara Ruddick (1980; 1995), maternal thinking refers to the values, intellectual capacities, and metaphysical attitudes that may arise from the daily work of mothering children, whether that work is done by women or men or by biological or adoptive mothers. In developing this concept, Ruddick drew on the philosophical traditions of Wittgenstein, Winch, and Habermas, which treat thought as arising from social practice. At the same time, she contributed to the strong current within 1970s and 1980s feminist scholarship that highlights the value of activities conventionally associated with women.

Maternal practice, Ruddick argues, is governed by three universal but culturally and historically shaped “demands” of children. First, children demand preservation. Protecting a child in the face of life's fragility produces the attitude of “holding,” of viewing the world with an eye toward keeping the child safe, knowing one cannot completely control the environment. Second, children demand nurturance. Helping the child grow physically, intellectually, and emotionally requires the capacity to welcome and understand complex, unpredictable change, both in children and in oneself. Third, children demand training so that they may achieve social acceptance. Fostering the child's moral and social development requires cultivating openness to the child's potential, including the child's potential difference from oneself. A mother also needs to model conscientiousness, resisting blind acceptance of her community's values.

Ruddick emphasizes that mothers are not inherently peaceful; some mothers neglect or abuse their children, and many mothers support the military actions of their sons, lovers, and states. Nonetheless, she proposes that maternal thought can be a resource for peacemaking. Drawing on the ideas of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., she identifies four principles that may arise from efforts to protect, nurture, and train children: renouncing violence against the vulnerable, resisting injustice in one's home or community, seeking reconciliation while holding people responsible for their actions, and keeping the peace when justice has been attained.

The greatest challenge for maternal thought is moving beyond protecting, nurturing, and training one's own children at the expense of others, thereby perpetuating racism, classism, and other forms of injustice and violence. And yet Ruddick finds that maternal thought can be a resource for a broader politics of resistance. For example, the Madres of Argentina, who resisted their government's kidnapping, torturing, and murdering of “the disappeared,” connected their fight for their children to the violence others suffer worldwide. Ruddick also claims that when mothers develop a feminist consciousness, they come to see clearly the harm they have suffered as well as inflicted on others, and they may come to understand connections between those forms of violence and state-sponsored violence. While feminism itself does not necessarily oppose all forms of violence, a maternal politics informed by feminism encourages the extension of local concerns to a global concern for all children.

In theorizing maternal thinking, Ruddick claims universality not for mothers' situations but for children's demands for preservation, nurturance, and training. She also acknowledges that she theorizes as a white, heterosexual, partnered, middle-class American woman. Some feminist critics, however, find that Ruddick's theorizing slips too easily into generalizing from privileged mothers' circumstances. Patricia Hill Collins, for instance, developed the concept of motherwork based on the experiences of poor and working-class mothers of color in American society. These mothers struggle for their children's survival, teach their children to preserve their identities in a racist society, and fight for empowerment in a society that exploits their labor.

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