Ruddick, Sara

Sara Ruddick (b. 1935), an American philosopher and feminist theorist, is best known for theorizing maternal practice, maternal thinking, and feminist maternal peace politics. She wrote the influential article “Maternal Thinking” (1980), where she argues that maternal practice, like the practice of any discipline, has the capacity to produce distinct forms of thought. She developed this idea further in Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1995), arguing that maternal thought is a resource for a feminist politics of peace. In these and other works, Ruddick treats mothers as thinking persons and maternal thought as potentially valuable to community, national, and global relations. In so doing, she debunks traditions in Western thought that elevate abstract reason over anything defined as particularistic, emotional, bodily, or feminine. Educated in the 1950s and 1960s at Vassar, Radcliffe, and Harvard, Ruddick taught philosophy and feminist theory for many years at Eugene Lang College at the New School University in New York City.

Challenges to Western thought's sexist bifurcations pervade Ruddick's first two books, both coedited collections on the place of chosen work in women's lives: Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk about Their Lives and Work (1977), and Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers, and Artists Write about Their Work on Women (1984). In autobiographical essays in these books, Ruddick describes her educational and academic experiences as sometimes exhilarating but as alienating her from anything womanly and eventually rendering her unable to write. Her compelling experiences as a mother, the deep pleasure she took in Virginia Woolf's writing, and the support of a feminist community helped her to integrate love and work and to embrace intellectual writing. This integration is apparent throughout her work.

In Maternal Thinking and more recent work, including articles on fatherhood, Ruddick articulates the gendered character of mothering and of caring work in general. She resists biological determinism, insisting that men are as capable as women of caring for children and developing maternal thought. Nonetheless, she rejects gender-neutral terms such as parenting. While she recognizes the risks of acknowledging sexual difference, she argues that denying the gendered character of care work holds more serious dangers. Ruddick also theorizes giving birth as at once different from and connected to mothering. She proposes that the experience of pregnancy and birth may give rise to natal reflection, characterized by active waiting, chosen pain, and a distinct conception of self and other.

Since Maternal Thinking, Ruddick has been concerned with the complexities of an ethics of care. In “Care as Labor and Relationship” (1998), she argues that care must be theorized not only as work, which was her focus in Maternal Thinking and which tends to overemphasize its burdens, but also as relationship, which emphasizes the wide range of emotions that caregivers and care recipients feel. The complexities of an ethics of care, and its relationship to an ethics of justice, also show up in Ruddick's articles on adolescent motherhood and assault and domination in families. She tackles these issues again in Mother Troubles (1999), which addresses the scapegoating of “bad” mothers and mothers' responsibility for the harm they sometimes inflict on children.

...