Personalizing for the Political:Maternal Thinking Amy Richards (bio) A few years ago I was interviewing people for a book I was undertaking about the relationship between motherhood and feminism. Almost every feminist scholar or researcher I talked to said, "You must read Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace." Despite these glowing endorsements, I hesitated to read the book then because I feared her ideas might make my premise redundant or that her thesis might talk me out of mine; I was also daunted by an already overwhelming research pile. Now, with my book, Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself, published and hers celebrating its twentieth anniversary, I prioritized reading this widely celebrated and still relevant treatise on mothers' motivations and how the world interacts with mothers and motherhood. The title promises that the book will reveal a greater understanding of a mother's psyche, but I think it more accurately offers to mothers a sympathetic ear and to everyone an analysis of why mothers are often overburdened with motherhood and, by extension, with many of society's ills. Ruddick gives mothers a platform, a novelty in 1989, before the baby-crazed twenty-first century. "Maternal competence," "maternal practice," "maternal authority"—Ruddick coined such terms to empower mothers with a language of their own and with the seeming hope that mothers could be freed from the expectations of a good mother. She bolsters mothers' confidence by portraying them as unwavering in their convictions and strengths. "Even the most powerless woman knows that she is physically powerful, stronger than her children," Ruddick writes, also noting a mother's "undeniable psychological power." And yet today disempowerment might be the biggest hurdle mothers face—letting children control one weighted against enforcing one's power and then being subjected to the "bad mother" stereotype or at least the guilt of not letting a child have his or her way. Ruddick grapples with the question of what control mothers have or how much control they need to relinquish. Certainly an important exercise, [End Page 299] but from my observations, as much as mothers want to be freed from the home, they can't relinquish control of their "headquarters" and all that happens there, precisely because they don't yet have control over the rest of their lives. To Ruddick, a mother's work is premised on the fact that children need to be cared for—"to be a mother is to be committed to meeting [a child's] demands." But I couldn't help but think, What about the mother who distinguishes between a need and a want and thus fails to meet every demand or simply can't or doesn't want to fulfill every demand? Ruddick's tone is mostly nonjudgmental, which I initially found comforting amid an increasingly mommy-bashing media. Her more sympathetic insights are offered under the guise of assuring mothers that it's "not just them," a realization mothers need in order to be less self-blaming for their perceived faults and perhaps more motivated to unify for mothers' empowerment. There is comfort in feeling heard and visible, but in her desire to understand and empathize with mothers, Ruddick invokes a universal experience of motherhood and mitigates our uniqueness. She acknowledges that our birth experiences are uniquely our own, as are our experiences with death, but otherwise treats mothers as one. As I reflected back on the book, the chapter that captivated me the most, "Training: A Work of Conscience?" was the one she described as her "harshest." I welcomed her toughness, something I believe mothers today need to jolt them out of their solipsism. And while I appreciated her attempts to make mothers visible, Ruddick absolves fathers and doesn't assume they have an innate or even learned responsibility to their children. "Fathers are not, in my terms, simply the male counterpart to mothers," Ruddick writes, without further defining their role. Conversely, I believe that mothers will be free from the burdens of motherhood only when fathers assume more child-rearing responsibilities and when their role as fathers is integrated into their identity. For instance, the majority of Maternal Thinking is devoted...