Jean Elshtain's writings on feminism, families, and politics were both profoundly important to the development of feminist theory and, at times, deeply puzzling. Elshtain engaged with central texts of western political thought in ways that enabled and encouraged others to think through what it would mean to take women's lives seriously in all their ambiguity and complexity. She strove to advance many important projects in her work:

• • To imagine a politics that does not depend on a sharp dualism between public and private and indeed recognizes that “public” and “private” are mutually constitutive

• • To affirm the importance of “intermediary organizations”—for example, families, religious organizations, friendship networks, and movement organizations—as counterweights to both isolating individualisms and a homogenizing state

• • To promote feelings of collective belonging and mutual responsibility (what she termed “patriotism”) without engaging in war

• • To imagine a politics that has a place for morality, as well as power, and that does not gender either side of that dualism

• • To develop a language and politics that is progressive without being individualistic and market-based

We shared with her many of these goals; yet, we also parted company with her at important moments.

Here, we explore two aspects of what came to be known as her “maternalist” approach to politics and political theory: (1) her insistence that women's traditional values of care—for and in the family—could be a source of resistance to the illegitimate demands of the state and (2) her belief that the fundamental formation of human beings and of citizens does and should take place primarily within the family. Although we agreed with many of her criticisms of isolated individualist liberalism, we found deeply puzzling her insistence that one learns to be human—and a citizen—only through a particular construction of family, the traditional two-parent, heterosexual household. Her keen awareness of ambiguity, complexity, and the social construction of families seemed to fade when she viewed gay, single-parent, and other nontraditional families. Elshtain apparently saw no bulwark against radical individualism apart from such “traditional” families and community values. Here, we suggest some of the things we think she got right, and some she got wrong, in her lifelong engagement with women, families, and political life.

Elshtain's essay “Moral Woman and Immoral Man” (Reference Elshtain1974) and her book Public Man, Private Woman (Reference Elshtain1981) analyzed issues of tremendous significance for feminist political theory. Arlene Saxonhouse, in her contribution to this roundtable, gives a nuanced explication of Elshtain's work on the public/private distinction in Public Man, Private Woman, and we offer just a short summary here. As second-wave feminists pushed to enter the public sphere, Elshtain insisted that while social, economic, and civic equality were important goals, feminist reformers ran the risk of denigrating or undervaluing women's traditional activities. The work of maintaining a home, providing care for family members, and particularly of nurturing and socializing children were absolutely essential activities, requiring knowledge and skill. Further, those activities incorporated and affirmed values that are essential to a pluralistic democratic polity. Indeed, she argued, “we are first and foremost not political man or economic man but family men and women” (Reference Elshtain and Diamond1983a, 307). Certainly laws that reinforced domestic hierarchy and encouraged male domination (and sometimes violence) had to be overturned; but Elshtain also insisted that public rules of justice, alone, could not provide the texture of intimacy that was essential to healthy adult and parent-child relationships within families. Family life developed and preserved important human values, and she contended that these values, and not only those that could be learned through public engagement, were of critical importance to both individual and collective life.

The primary custodians of private values were women, and in a series of articles Elshtain argued that women, in their domestic and maternal roles, not only sustained private households, but also could be a source of resistance to the illegitimate demands of a state. In “Antigone's Daughters” (Reference Elshtain and Diamond1983a), she first articulated the tensions between the “family claim” and the “social claim.” Her goal was to “begin from the standpoint of women within their everyday reality … to reclaim for women, construed as social actors in the world, an identity that pits them against the imperious demands of public power and contractual realities …” (Reference Elshtain and Diamond1983a, 304). She asked how values of nurturing, life-giving, and preserving that women developed in the family/household could be brought by them into the so-called public arena. For her, “[t]he standpoint of Antigone is of a woman who dares to challenge public power by giving voice to familial and social imperatives and duties.” Contemporary women must similarly be guardians of familial values, but without the quietism and subordination that went along with that traditional role (306–307).

As she continued to think about how women would bring their “maternal” values and insights into the public realm, Elshtain acknowledged a more complex process than she had first imagined. The “powers and dignities of women's traditional role,” she thought, were being ignored by “liberal egalitarian feminists.” When she returned to this question some years later—in “Antigone's Daughters Reconsidered”—she recognized that the answer to the question of how to reclaim maternal values without their accompanying quietism would emerge only from political struggle, from the interplay between action and thought (Reference Elshtain and White1989, 230; also Reference Elshtain1992, 59).

Elshtain saw this interplay in actual political life in the activities of Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo (The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) in Argentina. Visiting Buenos Aires in Reference Elshtain1982, she was powerfully affected by meeting these women whose children had been “disappeared” during the years of Argentina's “dirty war” (1974–1983). She saw the Madres as contemporary “daughters of Antigone”—risking everything to publicly challenge the military junta that had taken over the government. The Madres demanded the return of their loved ones, an accounting of what had happened to them, and accountability on the part of the perpetrators. Elshtain did not write about them immediately; in fact, she says, she hesitated for a long time, not knowing what to say, and not wanting, somehow, to “cheapen their grief and their political presence … falsify their voices by situating them in too straightened a framework, too academic a genre …” (Reference Elshtain, Bassin, Honey and Mahrer Kaplan1994, 84). Yet Elshtain had always insisted that theorizing must start from real women's lives; much of her most powerful writing begins with stories, her own, or those of others (e.g., Public Man, Private Woman; Women and War; and Jane Addams). And she found these women's stories compelling: we walked with the Madres in front of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires (while we were attending meetings of the International Political Science Association) in 1992; and, through Elshtain, we had an opportunity to speak at length with a number of the Madres, most notably Renee Epelbaum and Laura Bonaparte.

For Elshtain, these women were Antigone's daughters. They politicized their “private” grief, drawing—as she saw it—on the resources of family and community, to give them the courage to challenge a terrifyingly authoritarian and brutal military regime. Yet they were an even more powerful model for modern women than Antigone had been, because they acted collectively, as women, in a context where political action was thought to be impossible. At the same time, Elshtain also praised the Madres for having “encoded democracy in its specifically liberal understandings—grounded in human rights construed as immunities and duties—into their political self-definition.” (Elshtain sometimes embraced the concept of fundamental human rights, although she also put forth strident critiques of liberal politics and “rights talk” [1994, 89; Reference Elshtain and Grande Jensen1996, 144].) Perhaps she kept writing about the Madres—and kept insisting that she could not present a “tidy picture”—because they embodied the sort of politicized maternalism she so admired and advocated, but which had developed in an appalling political context, one that no one could wish for. Indeed, in the years after her initial engagements with the Madres, Argentinian feminists and activists argued about precisely this point (Feijóo Reference Feijóo, Jaquette and Wolchick1998; Feijóo and Gogna Reference Feijóo, Gogna and Jelin1985): could the forms of resistance that the Madres had perfected in the context of authoritarian dictatorship serve, in any way, as guidance for participation in a reconstructed democracy?

The story of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo is one of tremendous personal bravery and political skill, of activities undertaken by women who claimed authority by presenting themselves as the guardians of family members and of the family itself, both of which the state was destroying in wanton disregard of due process and of the respect due family and home. The Madres were protesting not only the wrong done to their children as individuals, but the wrong done to the families of the disappeared as well. Beyond the immediate losses was the fact that among the disappeared were pregnant women who gave birth in captivity and whose children were sometimes then “adopted” by members of the military.Footnote ¹ To protest this violation of the integrity of the family, the Madres were joined by Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo), who insisted on finding the offspring of the disappeared. Speaking out of what began as their individual grief, the Madres and Abuelas developed a collective analysis and voice that helped to topple the dictatorship. What more powerful example of a “maternalist politics” could one find?

The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo confirmed Elshtain's early skepticism about state power, and led her to think deeply about state interventions in family life. In two subsequent essays, “Political Children” (Reference Elshtain and Honig1995) and “The Chosen Family” (Reference Elshtain1998) she examined other instances of such intervention. In these essays, she discussed whether, when, and why parents should have the right to resist incursions by the state into family life; in the latter essay, her unease with nontraditional families—in this instance, single-parent households—becomes evident.

In “Political Children,” Elshtain engaged Hannah Arendt's essays “Reflections on Little Rock” and “Crisis in Education,” in which Arendt sharply criticized the politicization of children in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s. Arendt had argued (Reference Arendt1959, Reference Arendt1968) that certain human goods necessary to personal life and citizenship could only develop in private spaces, primarily the family, and that thrusting children into marches and protest demonstrations robbed them of the protective shield of intimacy and secrecy that families provide. Elshtain began her analysis by discussing the film A World Apart, a fictionalized portrayal of the relationship between a white antiapartheid activist, Ruth First, and her preteen daughter, Molly. Molly deeply resents both her mother's absence from home and the secrecy about her actions that shuts Molly out of this hugely important aspect of her mother's life. The questions the movie posed for Elshtain were complicated: Did the mother's absenting herself from home so that she could pursue justice, and then taking the daughter to a protest demonstration that could become violent, represent legitimate actions for a parent? Is a parent justified in leaving a child to engage in struggles for justice? In risking his or her life and permanent absence from the child? In taking a child into the political arena where the child, too, may be exposed to physical danger?

These questions of maternal obligation and political action linked Elshtain's discussion of Arendt to her own writings on the Madres de Plaza de Mayo; and her concern about whether to protect or involve other family members in one's protest echoed Antigone's arguments with her sister, Ismene. Protection of family privacy and the diverse values held by families were of central importance to Elshtain; but she judged that Arendt had not taken adequate account of political context in assessing the civil rights movement. Arendt based her condemnation of involving children in civil rights activism on her judgments of Nazi mobilizations of children—judgments that, Elshtain argued, were not applicable to the appearance of children in civil rights protests, in labor marches such as those led by Mother Jones, or in antiabortion demonstrations. “Children as workers, patriots, and protestors are powerful evidence of the ways in which these categories [social, political, private, public], and the realities toward which they gesture, bleed into one another, the most important of these being the child as apprentice citizen” (Elshtain Reference Elshtain and Honig1995, 282). The Nazi mobilization of youth took young people out of their families (and indeed had children turn on—and turn in—their parents), distinguishing that politicization from those in which parents lived out their values in the presence of their children and in which their leaving home with their children was an action taken precisely to protect those children from violence, state-caused or otherwise.

“The Chosen Family” (1998), a long review of four scholarly books on adoption in the United States, also explored the proper relationship between state and family. In that essay, discussing E. Wayne Carp's Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption, Elshtain severely criticized the removal of children from impoverished, immigrant (and disproportionately Catholic) families in cities of the northeastern United States in the late nineteenth century. The child welfare workers who organized the “orphan trains” that carried the children to the Midwest hoped that the children would find foster or adoptive families and would receive the moral upbringing and education that would make them responsible future citizens.Footnote ² Although these were not abductions joined to political repression, reprisal, and murder as had been the case in Argentina, this forced child-removal was an exercise of state power that often separated a child from his or her family (many of the children on the orphan trains had one or more living parents), and Elshtain unhesitatingly denounced it.

In the same essay, however, she seemed much less willing to challenge state-ordered separations of other children from their parents in our own day. She dismissed out of hand the concerns of those grappling with the extremely difficult issues of what weight to give to the genetic tie when deciding whether the state should terminate parental rights and free a child for adoption or attempt family reunification. She regarded as without merit the National Association of Black Social Workers' opposition to transracial adoption on the grounds that the removal of black children from their families and communities disparaged black families (and particularly black mothers). She derided the movement for opening adoption records or providing adult adoptees with their original birth certificates if they request them. The kind of careful, nuanced thinking that marked “Political Children” seems, here, to have given way to dismissal and disparagement. Considerations of community ties, of society's obligation to provide supports for parenting, of the identity concerns voiced by adult adoptees are rejected as nearly irrelevant when set against the goal of placing a child with an “intact” adoptive family.

It is hard to know what to make of this—it may be a reflection of Elshtain's increasing fear that the values of reciprocity, responsibility, and love that characterize family life at its best were in severe jeopardy. In recent writings she seemed to regard the two-parent, heterosexual, married couple as the only bulwark against the homogenizing power of the state, the erosion of intimacy, and the spread of market individualism into all realms of human life. Moving children out of single-parent households and into adoptive homes with two parents strengthened what was for her the normative family (and perhaps she thought it might also decrease what she saw as the scourge of out-of-wedlock births).

Her support for adoption in these circumstances is perhaps related to her opposition to gay marriage and gay parenting. In explaining why she espoused gay civil rights but not “the maximalist version of the liberationist ideology,” she explained that her defense of “the familial form and intergenerational ties” is a response to “two destructive forces at work in our time: excessive atomization, a kind of predatory individualism, on the one hand, and statism, our own variant of organicism, on the other.” She had little truck for what she labeled “family-like institutions” (as distinct from marital families) and did not seem to credit the possibility that gay parents could develop the same sort of “intergenerational ties” that characterize her (idealized) heterosexual family (Reference Elshtain1983b, 145). To an extent, this perspective seems to be a reflection of her belief that a claim for gay inclusion (in the form of marital rights and for recognition of families) is a manifestation of the extremes of market individualism that she so decried: “… gay liberationism becomes an extension of the classical liberal article of faith that the totality of individual self-interest(s) will redound to the general benefit” (1982, 253, footnote). Apparently, Elshtain saw the desire of same-sex couples to have one's romantic and intergenerational bonds legitimated by the state as a manifestation both of market individualism and of a dangerous desire to blur the boundaries of public and private by demanding public recognition for one's private behaviors (267, 274). It is true that she attempted to distinguish between what she termed the “egalitarian gay rights” perspective and “gay liberationism.” Nevertheless, many of her arguments about the latter seemed to reflect a caricature of the position and an inability to see parallels between gay rights and the claims of feminists and civil rights activists.

Elshtain worried that values she held dear—both because they lent dignity and purpose to individual lives and because they sustained communities—were being undermined or lost in atomistic market capitalism. That apprehension—one we shared with her to a considerable degree—led her to push to the side the sorts of ambiguities and complexities on which she had insisted in much of her earlier work. Confronted by the increasing dominance of market-based individualist ideas in the culture, Elshtain gravitated toward those traditional understandings of family and community that she had formerly held up to critical scrutiny. Her insight that the forces of market capitalism, liberal individualism, and a hyperindividualized notion of “rights” undermined the familial relationships she cared so much about seemed to blind her to the ways “alternative” families might also embody precisely those values, and offer opportunities to carry them forward in new ways.

Nevertheless, despite our occasional disagreements with her, particularly on the issue of what constitutes a “family,” we remain indebted to her raising of questions that still engage—and challenge—contemporary feminist and democratic theorists. How do we preserve values of intimacy and community (values that have often been associated with women) without reinforcing traditional gender roles and the female quietism that accompanied them? How do we revitalize democratic citizenship and reimagine bases for everyone to engage in the public business, both as individuals and as members of communities or collectivities? And, perhaps most compellingly in this contemporary moment, how do we articulate effective challenges to individualist, marketized capitalist models of social life? To have articulated these questions so powerfully, even if she could not yet answer them, was truly a gift to us all.