Maternal Thinking: Towards a politics of peace
Author: Sara Ruddick
As a man about to review a classic of feminist writing, I am reminded of Alexander Pope’s assertion that ‘fools rush in, where angels fear to tread’. My excuse is that I found this such a thought provoking, interesting, and well-written book, that I wanted to recommend it.
Sara Ruddick (1935-2011) was a philosopher, brought up to value rationality, and to embrace the ethereal, detached manner that her discipline endorsed. In the early chapters of this book, she gives her autobiography, from student to professor. But Maternal Thinking is really about the effect that pregnancy, birth, and the ongoing work of caring for children had on Ruddick’s identity and philosophical perspective. It created a new experience that changed everything, she says, moving her from abstract thought to this maternal thinking. It was a new way of seeing, feeling, and thinking about the world.
The value of thinking, and knowing, she came to see, is neither abstract nor detached. What is real and true arises out of practice. Indeed, one point that struck me is her argument for a link between thinking and the body. This links to mothering, and she quotes the early South African feminist Olive Schreiner: ‘No woman who is a woman says of a human body, “it is nothing”… On this one point, and on this point alone, the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that of man; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; he does not.’
So Ruddick’s emphasis is on the fleshiness of life, how thought emerges out of working, tending, eating, and listening, rather than from algebra or metaphysics. Caretakers are involved in the practicalities of the world – they do not abstract. She describes the fundamental attitude of reconciliation and protection, of ‘looking after’, the maternal function, as ‘holding’. This process involves repairing ‘the invisible weaving of a fragmented and threadbare family life’. Fostering children’s development involves selfless attention – its opposite being fantasy, the projection of self-centred aims and images.
Ruddick’s case for the superiority of this lens highlights how different it is to the cold analytic stance of much modern philosophy. In the last part of the book, she extends from the particularities of her own individual development to a societal view of caring for the world itself. She wants to argue that this too arises from the practice of care, not from any abstract idealism. This is the real fundamental message of the book. ‘There is nothing romantic about the extension of mother’s activity,’ she writes, ‘from keeping a safe home to making the neighbourhood safe’. Here we can add making the world safe, which Ruddick sees as an extension of the mother -child relationship. This body-close, practical knowledge is very different to the cool, distant, abstractions of ‘problem solving’. Here it is laid out more philosophically. Men familiar with the latter could gain a great deal from the knowledge Ruddick has digested, from which they may be excluded, and which Ruddick wants to share with them.
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