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  • Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good” Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence by Sarah LaChance Adams
  • Lisa Baraitser
Sarah LaChance Adams. Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good” Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence
Columbia University Press: New York, 2014, 248pp. ISBN 9780231166751

Sarah LaChance Adamss readable and engaging monograph, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good” Mother Would Do explores what the philosophies of care ethics, alongside the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir, might have to offer a philosophy of motherhood. Starting with the question of why mothers at times feel driven to kill their children (and historically this is not such an uncommon occurrence), her aim is to try to understand the often conflicted mother-child relationship within a care ethics framework, tracing a phenomenology of mothering that reveals the ambiguity inherent in all human relationships. Taking seriously this ambiguity as itself an ethical stance, results, she argues, in an ambivalent ethical orientation, one in which the interrelated yet separable interests of self and other can be held together and yet constantly reassessed. Her thesis is that ethics has to do with bearing this ambivalence without seeking to resolve it. Given that the conflict between mothers’ and children’s interests is often valid, Adams argues that ethical ambivalence is not a state that we would want to [End Page 273] overcome but rather embrace in its potential for precipitating moral subjects, helping us to recognize the alterity and the needs of others and those of our own. “I maintain,” she states, “that it is because of, not in spite of, the tensions inherent to mothering that it is an instructive case for ethics” (5).

And tensions there are indeed. We have seen a sustained interest over the last two decades in opening up motherhood as a site of ambivalent feelings at personal, social, and political levels that builds on the earlier work of seminal figures such as Adrienne Rich, Jane Lazarre, and Sara Ruddick, whom Adams draws on. Much recent research reveals how mothers are held responsible not just for managing their love and hate for their children without getting overwhelmed but for righting many of the social ills—poverty, inequality, social immobility, racism, violence—the consequences of which are often couched in terms of parental (read maternal) failure (e.g., Gillies 2007; Jensen 2010; Tyler 2009). This scholarship spans a wide interdisciplinary domain, taking in sociology and anthropology, psychoanalysis, feminist media studies, and feminist philosophy, and has been gathered more recently into the emergent field of “maternal studies.”1 It is therefore in keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of maternal studies that Adams attempts the balancing act of straddling both existential and social perspectives on ambivalence, claiming that the state of ambivalence in relation to a dependent other is both an unchanging existential condition, and yet can still be understood through, and exacerbated by, oppressive social structures. Poverty and racism, for instance, heighten ambivalence and ignore or sideline the needs and voices of mothers. Adams is searching, in other words, for an ethics that can acknowledge both our desires for motherhood (our needs for care and to care for others), and our needs for selfhood. Ultimately, the book is aimed at supplementing the care ethics literature with insights from feminist phenomenology, using the mother as a site to open the question of why we occasionally kill those we love, and mostly resist our impulses to abuse, neglect, and abandon others, including our children. Whilst the vulnerability of children is obvious, recognizing our more general condition of interdependence, Adams writes, “helps us to understand the true context for ethical life” (13). The book is peppered with “real life” examples of mothers’ experiences, drawn from a range of sources (news, legal cases, sociological and psychological research findings, literature, and personal anecdotes that appear in other scholarly work). This fleshes out Adams’s desire to reveal in more fine-grained detail the day-to-day experience of living the demands of motherhood.

The main theoretical arguments, however, are philosophical, and are staged through a conversation with Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and...

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