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Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace remains a strange work in terms of genre some twenty years after its initial pubUcation. In some ways it could be classified as part of an outlaw genre, not belonging to the genre of academic philosophical writing or to autobiography or to poUtical dieory. It isn't reaUy a mixture of aU these either so much as representing a coUision course of various strands of thinking that insist on putting pressure on one another. It could be said with justification that the theoretical parts seem somewhat contradictory, and indeed, AUson Bailey wrote something like that some years ago, pointing to the unhappy relation between the two dieoretical principles of the text. While the first half elaborates an idea of motherhood drawn from practicaUst view - the practicaUst conception of truth - the second derives a poUtics from feminist standpoint theory. The two principles reflect the title of the book. Its difficulty, however, Ues in the colon. There is no obvious conjunction that could substitute for that colon, but the second clause in no way elaborates the first.
The first section of the book in some ways invites us to use its findings and speculation to justify that colon. Ruddick writes of her "love affair" with Reason, which remains a true love outside the temporal and spatial context of the family unit. Once children appeared, the affair was substituted for the raising of...