Abstract
Sara Ruddick’s (1980) first work on “maternal thinking” was published in 1980. It is important to realize just how strange her ideas seemed to many people—including many feminists—at that time. Not only did she dare to suggest that the practices of mothering may give rise to a certain kind of moral thinking, she sought to turn that thinking to political use. In suggesting that mothers might contribute in distinctive ways to imagining or creating peace (Ruddick, 1995: xix), Ruddick was dismissed by philosophers, criticized by feminists and ignored by theorists of international politics. But she also set in motion waves of feminist research which would be inspired by her groundbreaking ideas on ethics, mothering, and peace.
In honoring Sara Ruddick with a Distinguished Woman Philosopher Award from the Society of Women in Philosophy in 2002, Hilde Lindemann Nelson (2003) so described Ruddick’s contribution to philosophy: “Like a medieval sage in possession of the philosopher’s stone, Sally has taken the dishonored dross of the work of mothering and turned it into intellectual gold” (p. 85). The idea for this special symposium, and the International Studies Association conference panel from which it developed, emerged out of a shared conviction that Ruddick’s work represents “intellectual gold” for the practice and theory of international relations (IR) as well. While at first sight, and to the uncritical eye, a philosophy of “mothering” might seem antithetical to the “high politics” of IR, we argue that this simplistic assumption is mistaken. Contrary to widespread perception, Ruddick’s insights on mothering, violence, and peace are intensely political, and her arguments about the nature of morality and moral judgment represent an important alternative to dominant, rationalist approaches in the discipline. While we are pleased to pay tribute to her important intellectual legacy in this symposium, we only wish that she could have read the articles and known the breadth and depth of her influence on us as IR scholars.
Sara Ruddick (née Sara Elizabeth Loop) was born in Toledo, Ohio, on 17 February 1935. After earning a PhD from Harvard University in 1964, she became a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, where for almost 40 years she taught courses on nonviolence, war, feminist moral thought, love, and on ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophers from Plato to Simone Weil. Together with her husband Bill, she was a committed antimilitarist activist, protesting wars from Vietnam to Iraq. Her experiences of mothering two children inspired her to think of mothers’ work as relevant to philosophy. Likewise, “her anti-militarism … led from early reflections on maternal practice to the larger political ambitions of Maternal Thinking” (Ruddick, 2011). She passed away on 20 March 2011, after a long debilitating illness.
Sara Ruddick’s influence on the field of feminist ethics can hardly be underestimated. Indeed, Virginia Held locates the beginnings of what is now widely known as “care ethics” with Ruddick’s 1980 essay, “Maternal Thinking.” This essay and the book of the same name were the first philosophical recognition that mothers think, that there are characteristic standards for reasoning in this activity, and that one can discern moral values being striven for and expressed in this practice (Held, 1993: 88). Care ethicists have relied heavily on Ruddick’s arguments on mothering practices, and how these give rise to a relational, contextual approach to morality. While care ethics widens the scope of care to include other carers and other types of caring—for the elderly or the chronically ill, for example—Ruddick’s focus on the practices of mothering continue to be a source of both inspiration and critique for moral and political theorists.
Scholars influenced by Ruddick’s work on mothering, care and ethics have, in recent decades, begun to explore the relevance of these ideas for IR. Fiona Robinson’s (1999, 2011) work on the ethics of care and IR has explored how care ethics offers a compelling alternative to rationalist, rights-based or “justice” reasoning in international ethics. Her most recent book considers care ethics as a basis for rethinking human security—where security is understood as achieved in and through relations of responsibility and care (Robinson, 2011). Kimberly Hutchings’ impressive body of work on global ethics is strongly influenced by feminist ethical voices; of particular note is her work addressing various feminist ethical responses to political violence (Hutchings, 2000, 2007; Hutchings and Frazer,
While Ruddick’s work has been a broad source of inspiration for feminist and other critical scholars of international ethics and international political theory, perhaps her central contribution has been in the area of peace studies. Part III of her seminal book is devoted to an explanation of maternal thinking as a resource for peace politics. Here she juxtaposed the concrete and preservative logic of maternal thought with the abstract rationality of militarism, drawing the contours of contemporary feminist engagements with questions of war, peace, and security. Her articulation of the potential for moral detachment inherent in abstract thinking has inspired the feminist interrogation of the ethical implications of national security discourse (Cohn, 1987, 1993), weapons of mass destruction (Cohn et al., 2005; Cohn and Ruddick, 2004), and “computer-aided global systems of military violence” (Blanchard, 2011). This work highlights how the technical and metaphorical aspects of war-making provide us with an illusion of safety, which makes it possible to conceive of (while simultaneously concealing) unspeakable human suffering. By contrast “preservative love” (Ruddick, 1995) and “attentive thinking” (Ruddick, 2003) foster a kind of rationality never detached from the shared fragility of the human experience and always suspicious of structural and direct violence wherever it occurs, “in boardrooms, bedrooms, factories, classrooms, battlefields” (Ruddick, 1995: xviii). Asking for whom and to what purpose is security pursued (Basu, 2011; Marhia, 2013; Sheperd, 2008) and exposing the highly masculinized enterprise of security (Cohn, 1987; Enloe, 2000; Tickner, 1992) have been the business of feminist IR and in particular of feminist security studies. Feminist IR scholars have continued to investigate the “continuum of violence” (Cockburn, 2004, 2010; Confortini, 2006), redefined security from the lives of women (Anderlini, 2007; Tickner, 1988, 1992), and articulated more comprehensive, more just conceptions of peace (Cockburn, 2007, 2012; Confortini, 2012).
Ruddick’s detailed descriptions of mothers’ violence, militarism, and the mobilization of mothers (and sometimes mothers’ supposed peacefulness) for war ends remain relevant for the study of female violence (Åhäll, 2012; Melzer, 2011; Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007) and mothers’ political agency (Eichler, 2012). Whether or not their work acknowledges Ruddick’s legacy, these authors, like Ruddick herself, recognize that, while violent women are thought of as unnatural, emotional, or nonthinking, they are, in fact, “complex [political] actors in a complex world” (McEvoy, 2009: 265). Finally, whether through engagement with her philosophical argument, or in agreement with or opposition to a perceived empirical argument, work on women’s and feminist peace activism is deeply indebted to Sara Ruddick (Alonso, 1993; Cockburn, 2007, 2012; Confortini, 2012; Magallón Portolés, 2012; Rupp, 1997). Just as “[m]aternal struggles to achieve nonviolence parallel and illuminate the struggle to achieve a sturdy peace” (Ruddick, 1995: 183), this work articulates the theoretical and political contributions of feminist antimilitarists to our understanding of violence, peace, and conflict. Their efforts highlight how some conflicts are not only inevitable, they might in fact be necessary to “reveal the greater safety, pleasure, and justice” in the world (Ruddick, 1995: 135).
But while Ruddick’s work has clearly been of great—if often unacknowledged—influence, it has also been the source of much controversy. It is, perhaps, not surprising that the idea of “maternal thinking” should generate debate, particularly among feminists. For many, “maternal thinking” suggests an essentialist ethics, which valorizes women’s “natural” roles as mothers and appears to advocate that they behave in ways which ensures their relegation to the private sphere—to the “nursery and the kitchen, to purdah and to poverty” (O’Neill, 1992: 55). But the contributors to this symposium surmise that many of those who have leveled this kind of criticism have probably stopped reading Ruddick’s book at the title or at least have read it with their minds already made up. Indeed, Ruddick is well aware that she is often heard, by her audiences, as “idealizing” mothers, and that this idealization is linked to a dangerous essentialism, which ignores differences among mothers and the oppressions that some but not all mothers suffer (Ruddick, 1995: 28–29). In Maternal Thinking, Ruddick works hard to dispel these readings of her work, emphasizing the political nature of dominant discourses of mothers and mothering. “The Good Mother,” an idealized figure who casts a “long shadow” on many actual mothers’ lives, is contrasted with the many visions of “the Bad Mother”; both of these myths, however, inspire “ignorant contempt for the actual work that mothers do” (Ruddick, 1995: 32).
Indeed, Maternal Thinking continues with point after point that eschews essentialist or conservative assumptions about mothering. Mothers, Ruddick reminds us, are not always patient, kind or nurturing; mothers can be violent toward their children. And even when mothers believe and act according to an ethic of nonviolence at home, Ruddick (1995) is clear that there is “no evidence that mothers more or less automatically express domestic ideals of nonviolence publicly” (p. 176). Indeed, she notes that mothers who practice nonviolence at home nonetheless sometimes teach their children to hate “all the people their relatives hate” (Ruddick, 1995: 177). Ruddick is not afraid of these examples of maternal practice; but rather, she recognizes mothering as an “ongoing struggle.” This struggle is not only internal; it is a struggle to ferret out the meaning of dominant values and to ask whose interest they serve and how they affect her children (Ruddick, 1995: 237–238). In this sense, mothers are uniquely positioned in society to resist—to be “disloyal to the civilization” that depends on them (Ruddick, 1995: 225).
Thus, although Ruddick has been recognized as one of the “founding scholars in feminist IR” (Tickner and Sjoberg, 2011: x), her work is often misinterpreted, misjudged, misquoted, or maligned. For example, she has been critiqued for universalizing a practice that was in fact specific to white middle-class US women’s experiences (e.g. Bailey, 1995; DiQuinzio, 1993; Lugones, 2003; Scheper-Hughes, 1998) and for making essentialist claims about mothers’ peacefulness (e.g. Sharoni, 2010). However, all of the contributors to this symposium start from a recognition that Ruddick’s argument is not ethnographic or empirical but rather philosophical and epistemological. Whether those practices are universal or specific to particular social locations is, as Carol Cohn states in this issue, “beside the point.” Rather, Ruddick’s attention is focused on ways of thinking that arise from the particular practices of mothering. The articles in this symposium intend to recuperate the epistemic value of Maternal Thinking for our understanding of politics and the political.
A number of articles address questions of peace and nonviolence in Ruddick’s work, and their importance for international ethics and the theory and practice of IR. Carol Cohn brings Ruddick’s discussion of “vulnerability” to bear on our understanding of security. She argues that Maternal Thinking provides a strong resource to destabilize and denaturalize what counts as “reason” in national security and humanitarian assistance discourse. She juxtaposes the “metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities/habits, and identification of virtues” (Cohn, this issue) of security thinking with those of Maternal Thinking, focusing on the different ideas about vulnerability developed in and through the distinctive practices of mothering and national, international, and human security politics. In contrast to these, Maternal Thinking conceives of vulnerability as “inevitable, existential and shared” (Cohn, this issue), prompting us to envision more realistic alternatives to “business as usual” in security politics.
Catia Confortini and Abigail Ruane propose that Ruddick’s contribution to a theory of peace is the identification of an epistemological inclination toward encounters with “the other” that enables the construction of more just kinds of peace. They use John Paul Lederach’s conception of justpeace to express the kind of substantially and comprehensively nonviolent social arrangement that Ruddick envisages. A mothering epistemology weaves together self and other in recognizing that “knowledge is simultaneously individual and collective, relational and autonomous, aware of power asymmetries yet not determined by them” (Confortini and Ruane, this issue). Through the practices of living with and overcoming “dissonances between apparently dualistic identities and goals” (Confortini and Ruane, this issue), mothers build a platform for substantively inclusive and empowering relationships. The authors suggest possible contextual applications of mothering epistemology to pre-conflict human rights violations and post-conflict restorative justice processes to show how it can encourage practices that balance individual and social, present and future, and local and global well-being.
Fiona Robinson’s article—perhaps the outlier of the group—focuses not on Ruddick’s contribution to theorizing peace and nonviolence but rather on her work as an intellectual resource for helping us to navigate the discursive and political tensions between women as mothers and women “as women.” Her article explores the discursive gender politics of maternal health—specifically the Canadian government’s 2008 “Muskoka Initiative” on maternal and child health. Robinson relies on Ruddick’s work to help show why feminists cannot ignore women’s roles as mothers—in global health policy—simply by calling for a recognition of women “as women.” Rather, these roles need to be interrogated and critiqued so that “maternal health” is tied to wider questions of gender oppression.
Finally, the article by Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings also finds Ruddick’s work to offer a productive way of holding a “tension”—this time among “contestations within feminism over peace, violence and the questions of war” (Frazer and Hutchings, this issue). In an effort to dispel simple equations between maternal thinking and pacifism, Frazer and Hutchings explain how the ideals of maternal thinking play a “regulative, rather than either legislative or strategic, role in her judgments about the uses of organized violence in the public sphere” (Frazer and Hutchings, this issue). Once again, this article draws attention to the role of Ruddick not only as a moral philosopher, but as a political thinker, whose subtle and carefully crafted arguments compel us to rethink principled or polemical responses when considering violence in international politics.
This special symposium aims at celebrating Ruddick’s legacy and at stimulating renewed engagement with her work. We hope these articles will show that Maternal Thinking offers a wealth of critical resources for rethinking international political theory and the politics of international ethics, as well as the “traditional” IR issues of security, war, and peace. We ask that people take as much care in evaluating her work as she did of the work of mothers, and indeed of any kind of work. All of the essays in this symposium offer some starting points for considering how the practices and thinking involved in mothering allow us to conceive of politics in a disruptive, resistant way, finding alternatives to what is too often considered normal and “common sense.”