Maternal Thinking:
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth
MATERNAL THINKING Toward a Politics of Peace Sara Ruddick Beacon Press, $24.95, 291 pp. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Feminist discourse about male dominance had a frightening moment in the 1970s....
...Mothers who turn militarist do pose questions to Ruddick's general position, and she admits of militaristic mothers whose "continued support for war needs explaining," but she does not explain...
...Maternal Thinking is so much in the spirit of "in a different voice " feminism that it misses the full peace chorale...
...She hopes that maternal thinking will be a key, if not the key, source of opposition to militaristic public policy, but she also supplies the voice of political realism by presenting her hope as an empowering myth, not a tribute to an emergent political reality...
...After critics began to cry "blaming the victim," another wave of attention revealed various images of mothering-operating "in a different voice," in Carol Gilligan's phrase-that redirected the great search for the whys and hows of male dominance...
...With Sheila Tobias she is the editor of the forthcoming, Women, Militarism and War: Essays in Feminism, Politics and Social Theory, to be published this year by Rowman and Allanheld...
...The first is that different types of thinking arise from different types of activity or practice...
...In stolid, sometimes sentimental, but very clear and nonthreatening philosophical language, Ruddick argues for two claims...
...On the last count, maternal thinking can slip into the frightening business of fostering male dominance, for mothers can want their children to be socially acceptable on patriarchal terms...
...Ruddick gives no indication of what thinking and what conditions brought her feminist and nonfemin-ist, female and male, predecessors to their work...
...She was one of the founders of the National Book Critics Circle and has been a Pulitzer Prize judge...
...The strategies Ruddick uses to meet this problem clash with each other constantly...
...But a specter arose: perhaps it is mothers who foster male dominance by reproducing motherhood in their daughters and urging an autonomy upon their sons that leads to misogyny, a kind of Use majeste against moms...
...She is certainly aware that, to protect her child, a mother may work for world peace, but she may also work for the death of her enemies...
...From the contemporary world scene, dotted with wars and struggling peace groups, Ruddick selects only one example of "maternal thinking" to look at in detail: the Argentine and Chilean madres who have so courageously protested their governments' "disappeared" policies of torture and murder...
...Sara Ruddick is alert to the empirical and political complexities that trouble her arguments...
...A collection of her essays, Mind and Body Politics, will appear this month...
...Pacificism is nearly as old as war, and international peace movements and congresses began to work for political, legal, and moral strictures against war in the wake of the 1848 European revolutions...
...The slogan "The Malvinas belong to us and so do our sons" is heartbreakingly complex...
...Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking originated in this second wave of feminist concern with motherhood...
...The practice specific to mothers, meeting the demands of children for "preservation, growth, and social acceptability," gives rise to "maternal thinking," which is, summarily, "attentive love...
...But the generalizations wing right over complex terrain, leaving behind specificities of political culture, historical experience, class, race, sexual orientation, religion...
...Ruddick's hope is for "a feminist maternal peace politics...
...The second claim is that maternal practice and thinking, corrected with feminist consciousness, can and should influence public policy, converting it from militarism to peace...
...On the one hand, she uses universal concepts-there is just one "maternal thinking," not a plurality-and on the other hand, she often frankly admits that she is conceptualizing on the basis of her own late twentieth-century American, urban, middle-class liberal, areligious, married mothering of a daughter and a son...
...Her most recent book is Women and War (Basic Books, 1987...
...In this conception the body is not fearful, either in its pleasures or its suffering...
...She acknowledges that many mothers would find such conclusions unintelligible, but she still attributes them to "maternal thinking" generally construed...
...Even so, she seems to me to slight the diversity of REVIEWERS ROBERT GILLIAM is a librarian at SUNY Brockport...
...The second contextthat Ruddick's work does not account for is historical and political...
...Bodies are at least as important as the causes that use them...
...First, mothers, maternal practices, and maternal thinking all come in many varieties, historically and in the present tense...
...To me it is not clear why "feminist peace politics" would not be a more powerful means to the desired goal than "feminist maternal peace politics...
...So maternal thinking needs feminist consciousness to avoid supporting the status quo...
...they are resistance groups...
...But they build on a legacy of successes and failures and come to their convictions and political practices from very diverse backgrounds, as the 1988 anthology Women on War richly and eloquently demonstrates...
...Attention was directed to the neglected sphere where women, not men, dominate-mothering, early child care...
...In this argument, there is no indication of what kinds of practice Ruddick considers the source of feminist thinking, which is charged with being the corrective...
...BARBARA A. BANNON is the former executive editor and forecast editor of Publishers Weekly...
...But these are not, Ruddick admits, peace groups...
...JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN is the Centennial Professor of Political Science at Vander-bilt University...
...It is certainly the case now that women are contributing more to peace movements than they ever have before, both because more women are engaged in public spheres and because they bring to their activism so little experience as officers and gentlemen...
...there is in maternal thinking a sturdy antimili-tarist conception of the body...
...Birth is privileged over death and with that privilege comes a commitment to protect and a prizing of the physical being in its resilience and variety...
...Similarly, she does not consider why so many of the female theorists of nonviolence she cites are not mothers...
...Because she only posits but does not explore in their diversity types of links between practices and thinking, Ruddick can only invoke submission to patriarchy as an explanation for why mothering does not inevitably result in nonviolent politics...
...Here is an example of Ruddick's philosophical flight...
...ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL is the author of two biographies, Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud...
...The autobiographical strain in the book shows humility and great sensitivity to conflicting views among mothers and about them...
...Their resistance strategies are nonviolent-they have no weapons-but they have not translated their brand of resistance into opposition to militarism or national war...
...sources that have historically inspired peace movements in local, national, and international contexts...
...More elaborately, it is nonin-strumental, nonacquisitive thinking that is flexible in the face of change, resiliently good-humored, development-nurturing, and richly focused on social relationships...
Vol. 116 • July 1989 • No. 13
