Mother's Care?: Models of Motherhood and their Ethical Implications in Post–WWII German Literature

This article compares early texts from feminist ethicists (Nel Noddings and Sara Ruddick) that focus on care and/or mothering as the basis for ethical models with literary works by two German authors (Christa Wolf and Ingeborg Drewitz) that challenge these models and reveal their structural problems. Although the literary works appeared generally shortly before the feminist scholarship, they all participate in a discussion of how women's experiences as mothers and caregivers can and/or should factor into the construction of ethical models. Furthermore, the conflicts that come to the fore in the literary texts foreshadow the directions that feminist ethicists themselves went in a continuing dialogue about feminist contributions to the study of ethics. Specifically, the article 1) explores how these two authors illustrate the potential problems with an ethics based either on "maternal thinking" or on a more abstract notion of caring; 2) discusses the directions in which their work points us; and 3) uses feminist scholarly discussions on ethics as conceptual tools to illuminate more fully the central conflicts in the literary texts themselves.