"I envision a future in which maternal thinkers are respected and self-respecting": The Legacy of Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking

The year 2009 marks twenty years since the publication of Sara Ruddick's monumental text Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, a book that is regarded, along with Adrienne Rich's 1976 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, as the most significant work in maternal scholarship and the new field of motherhood studies. And in 2009 Demeter Press published my edited volume Maternal Thinking: Philosophy, Politics, and Practice to commemorate and celebrate this herstoric anniversary.

I first encountered Sara Ruddick's work in Joyce Trebilcot's 1984 collection, Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, which included two essays by Ruddick: "Maternal Thinking" and "Preservative Love and Military Destruction: Some Reflections on Mothering and Peace." It was spring 1985 and I was the mother of a ten-month-old son and just finishing my first master's course on the subject of "women, violence, militarism, and war." I knew then that I wanted motherhood to be my area of expertise, though this was going to be a hard sell, given that my master's and then my PhD were in the field of English studies. It would be another five years and two more children before I would read Maternal Thinking in the summer of 1990. That year I was reading for my Major Field Comprehensive Exam on the topic of women's studies in literature and I had convinced my committee to substitute books on motherhood on the reading list. My plan was to head to my mother's place for three weeks, with my three kids—aged just turned 1, 3½, and 6—and my son's best friend, also 6, but without my partner, who was home in Toronto. I arrived at my mom's small cottage with a pile of books, four kids under six years old, no partner or car, and little money. My mother, while adoring of her grandkids, was usually too overwhelmed by them to offer much help. Although I came with the best of intentions, to study and rest well, I did not get much rest or studying done in those weeks. But I did read, or more accurately, consume, Maternal Thinking, sneaking away to read the book whenever I could, like an addict in need of a hit.

Today, close to twenty years later, that original copy of Maternal Thinking sits on the desk beside the keyboard as I write these reflections on Ruddick's monumental text. The cover of the book features an artist's drawing of a woman with her hand to her head, clearly engaged in deep thought, with these words written underneath: "The first attempt to describe, from a philosophical perspective, the thinking that grows out of the work mothers do." For me, and I suspect for most mothers and scholars of motherhood, this is what made Maternal Thinking so life changing and groundbreaking. Ruddick foregrounded what all mothers know—motherwork is inherently and profoundly an intellectual activity—and theorized the obvious: mothers think. "The work of mothering," as Ruddick writes in Maternal Thinking, "demands that mothers think; out of this need for thoughtfulness, a distinctive discipline emerges" (24). I first read those words on an overcast summer day as my young children played on a nearly deserted windswept beach. The lines are underlined and the page number circled twice and the paragraph remains soiled by sand and water. Yes, mothers think!

In Maternal Thinking Ruddick seeks to divest mothering of biology, nature, instinct, and sentiment so as to define it as a practice, one governed by maternal thinking. Maternal practice, according to Ruddick, is characterized by three demands: preservation, growth, and social acceptance. "To be a mother," continues Ruddick, "is to be committed to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training" (1989, 17). When mothers set out to fulfill the demands of motherwork, they are engaged in maternal practice; and this engagement, in turn, gives rise to a specific discipline of thought—a cluster of metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities, and values that Ruddick...