Part III Gender as maternal practice and maternal thinking
7.1. Introduction
In Maternal Thinking Towards a Politics of Peace (1989) Ruddick employs a practicalist explanation to explain gender difference. This view holds that all thinking arises from and is shaped by the practices people engage in (p.9). In
applying this perspective to women she argues that for many women, their practice is centrally defined by mothering, where mothering is construed as a form of work and a practice that demands a distinctive form of reasoning or thinking (p.17). Ruddick describes mothering as a response to three basic demands that all children present to mothers: preservation, growth and social acceptability. The mother meets these demands through the work of preservative love, nurturance and training for social acceptance. Ruddick defines a mother as someone who responds to these three main demands which essentially define maternal work. She considers preservation to be a paramount demand, as it is a universal need that creates, defines and is constitutive of the category of maternal work. Responding to children’s demands through maternal practice involves mothers having to think about strategies in the form of disciplined reflection that entails intellectual capacities, judgements, and
metaphysical attitudes (p.23-24). Implicit in Ruddick’s view of maternal practice and children’s demands is the assumption that children need to be ‘brought up’ as
opposed to simply just ‘growing up’ (Lazarre 1987:163).
As discussed in the previous chapter, critics of Ruddick have pointed out that she essentialises mothering practice and thinking as well as children’s demands. The
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essentialism of her argument rests on her notion that maternal practice is primarily driven and constituted by a set of universal demands made by children; preservation, growth and social acceptability. In other words, children’s vulnerability and
dependence evoke in mothers a distinctive form of maternal thinking and practice.
The maternal practices are universal because they are responses to a ‘biological child in a social world’ (Ruddick 1989:17); the social worlds vary but the biological child is invariant. It is this ‘necessity’ that determines mothers’ perceptions of the need for care in children. Ruddick assumes that children are able to assert agency in
demanding care from mothers. The social relation between mothers and children is conceptualised as being driven and constructed around some innate, natural
properties in children.
Critics argue that this notion of maternal practice does not account for the way in which maternal practice is socially constructed by race and class for example
(Patricia Collins 1994). Lawler (2000:126), for example, argues that children’s needs are not derived from any intrinsic quality of children but rather from the social cultural context in which adults define children’s nature. Their needs are socially constituted and thus carry with them power implications that are historically variable and politically contestable. Frazer and Lacey (1993:17) argue that human action and practices related to care are bound to and interpreted within various social, economic, cultural and institutional discourses and contexts. As much as these practices and discourses exist independently of social subjects, human action and practices also constantly constitute them. This means that social practices do not have intrinsic purposes or aims in themselves, but rather that these are made by people in particular social, economic and political contexts.
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Ruddick’s notion of maternal practice is also described as a micro-interpretive, social/symbolic interaction perspective which does not take into account the power of external, macro social structural influences on social behaviour. Critics query the usefulness of an emphasis on individual subjective meanings, intentions,
experiences, actions and interpretations in formulating general explanations (Giddens 1976).
While acknowledging that there is political and social variation among children and those who care for them:
“Despite the variations among children and those who care for them, these demands, I claimed define, essentially, a kind of work” (Ruddick 1989:51).
Ruddick still maintains that mothers are naturally compelled to protect their children:
“I do expect sufficient commonality in the demands made by our children to enable us to compare, which also means to contrast the requirements of our work.” (p. 53).
Despite claiming the existence of a general mode of maternal thinking and practice she does state that her own experience and social position, which are the source of her claims, affects here conceptions of maternal thinking and work:
“I write out of a middle-class, technocratic, property-oriented culture
ambivalently obsessed with bonds of biology. ... I make claims about all children and I believe them. But I make those claims out of a particular intellectual training and Protestant heritage that taught me to look for human needs and desires underlying the divisions between women and men and between cultures”
(p. 54-55).
While recognising the diversity of mothering and the specificity of her own
mothering she does not however explore other different maternal practices and her claims therefore remain universalist and essentialist.
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Her scientifically rather dubious claim, notwithstanding, the essentialist
underpinnings of mothering leads her to make several assumptions about mothers’
behaviour: that they know how to respond to children’s demands, that they respond to these demands in an invariant and unchangeable way, that they engage in
reasoning and intellectual activity when responding to children’s demands, that their practice reflects their thinking and that what they do is primarily driven by children’s demands. It is difficult to empirically test all these assumptions, not least of all because they have been the starting point of much existing research in South Africa.
Several qualitative studies of mothering (Phoenix and Woollett 1991, Scarr and Dunn 1987, Sanger 1999, Amadiume 1987, Magwaza 2003, Sudarkasa 2004,
Jeannes and Shefer 2004, McMahon 1995, Pillay 2007) show how social, economic, cultural, historical and political factors influence mothering. Ribbens (1990a, 1990b, 1993, 1994) has also conducted international studies on childrearing which has given an ‘insider’s perspective’ of women’s position and experiences of being a mother.
However, there also exist studies which describe the status of children in society, as well as related institutional policies and programmes on children that can be used to reflect on maternal practices, meanings and institutional discourse of mothering and children’s needs. I propose, therefore, to use some of this available secondary evidence to consider Ruddick’s notions of mothering practice and children’s demands.