Sara Ruddick was a towering figure in feminist ethics of care, epistemology, and peace politics. Her work is considered foundational in all three feminist subfields. In addition to these contributions, at the end of her well-known book, Maternal Thinking (Reference Ruddick1989), Ruddick sketches a transcultural and transnational feminist solidarity that might usefully augment contemporary theories of transnational feminist solidarity. Feminist solidarity, according to Ruddick, seeks to “identify with women's culturally specific struggles to work, care, and enjoy, to think and speak freely, and to resist abuse” (Reference Ruddick1989, 240–41). Theories of feminist solidarity often emphasize shared struggles rather than shared identities, and it is the shared struggle to work that Ruddick offers as a basis for expanding feminist solidarity across borders. Ruddick, like other feminist theorists, most notably bell hooks (Reference Hooks1984), offered “solidarity” as a response to the earlier feminist collective political model of “sisterhood.” She rightly notes the various problems with sisterhood: “The sisterhood of women was based on allegedly shared oppression and shared responsibility for caring labor” (Reference Ruddick1989, 239). Race and class divisions, cultural differences, and variations of experiences (and degrees) of oppression clearly revealed the impossibility of the sisterhood model. Ruddick, like Chandra Talpade Mohanty, employs a notion of solidarity that “foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work and fight together” (Mohanty Reference Mohanty2003, 7). But unlike Mohanty and similar accounts of solidarity in struggle, Ruddick identifies the struggle to work as the primary unifying theme, rather than the struggles to end tyranny, violence, and oppression (Harcourt Reference Harcourt2014; Mohanty Reference Mohanty2003; Scholz Reference Scholz2008; Weber Reference Weber2006), which are further contrasted with accounts of solidarity as socially expansive empathy (Ferguson Reference Ferguson, Ferguson and Nagel2009; Gould Reference Gould2007). In this sense, the framework for feminist solidarity and the potential for transnational feminist solidarity embraces a struggle to rather than the oppositional struggle against. Ruddick, in other words, provides one model for political solidarities that are not inherently oppositional (cf. Scholz Reference Scholz2008).
The “work” that is at the heart of the struggle to work as a basis for feminist solidarity is not the traditional conception of work that stands in opposition to domestic life. Rather, as I argue in this article, Ruddick reconceives work into what I call “living work” or “integrative work.” To work, to care, to enjoy life, to think, to speak freely, and to resist abuse or violation are interconnected and descriptive of integrative work or living work as Ruddick understands this notion. Living work is, then, all those activities that give meaning to one's existence. Ruddick expands work to include all those things that a person finds fulfilling and enjoyable, including care of the family and participation in a community. Understood as a coalition built on connections in struggles to work and in the context of the richer meaning of work that she provides, Ruddick offers some theoretical tools useful for thinking about the inclusiveness and diversity of transnational feminist solidarity.
The first section presents Ruddick's reconceptualized notion of work drawing on her debt to Virginia Woolf and compares it to a socially structured model of work that bifurcates professional work and domestic activity. The second section describes the work of mothers who are also peacemakers. This is Ruddick's prime example of the living model of work, but it is often read independently of her notion of work. While much may be gained from such an independent reading, I suggest that a richer understanding of Ruddick's philosophy emerges through a more comprehensive understanding of “work” in her thoughts on the “work of mothering” and the “work of peacemakers.” The third section discusses feminist solidarity and the challenges of diversity. The fourth section concludes with some thoughts for a transnational feminist solidarity built on Ruddick's understanding of work but mindful of lingering worries over parts of her account.
RECONCEIVING WORK
Ruddick's first book and early essays all center on work. In a way, this focus was autobiographical. Like so many academic women of her generation (and arguably still today), Ruddick sought a balance between doing the philosophy she loved, caring for the family she loved, and engaging in the social gatherings of friends she loved. The frustrating thing for Ruddick was that only one of these counted as “work” according to society's traditional conception of work. Three important points emerge from this revelation: First, a traditional understanding of work required a separation from family and the social life of friends. Family or friends proved a distraction from work; the successful worker was able to lend a singular focus to his or her work that blocked out these distractions. Second, to choose family and the social life of friends was to reject the life of traditional work, and yet neither caring for family nor being social with friends was or is leisure time activity. Third, the traditional conception of work also contributed significantly to a person's identity and value in society. Those who were forced or who chose not to work were cut off from the primary means by which social value (and personal identity) was measured.
Many scholars and critics alike read Ruddick's Maternal Thinking as an attempt to demonstrate mothering as work. In other words, the book is presented by many secondary scholars as a careful attempt to demonstrate that the activity of the domestic sphere ought to be valued to the same extent (or perhaps even more) (Bailey 1995) as socially determined work that occurs outside the home for a wage. Mothering, like other activities, requires and develops special skills and epistemological resources. That reading of Maternal Thinking is not entirely correct, however. When read through Ruddick's earlier writings, we see that such a reading fails to see some of the subtlety of her argument. She isn't recovering the activity of the domestic sphere as work; she is transforming what is and what ought to be meant by work.
Ruddick's reconceptualization of work seeks to recover a sense of work as activity that one loves, much like play or the joy of study as a child:
In our discussions today of work and its problems, many of us talk in terms of a dual existence. We see through two lenses, travel on two rails, live in two spheres—one of work, the other of love. I used to think that I needed to find a work life to run parallel to my love life. Now I believe that I needed to recover the inseparability of work and love common among children, natural to me as a schoolgirl (1977, 136).
Throughout her writings on work, Ruddick weaves her autobiographical experience of worklessness. She was able to overcome her paralysis as a writer only when work became “simultaneously a duty, a right, and an illicit pleasure” (139). As a duty, a right, and a pleasure, work becomes the complex and sometimes contradictory activity that gives meaning to existence.
Some feminists will argue that respecting women's work in and for the family is the same thing as validating patriarchal constructs that exclude women from professional work. Ruddick's reimagining of work provides another way to think about work in the family—as essential, desirable, fulfilling, annoying, unfulfilling, and intrusive simultaneously. Moreover, it is no longer “women's work”—all of us ought to be able to pursue or have a right (or even an obligation) to work that integrates the variety of fulfilling aspects of our lives.
From Virginia Woolf to Feminist Politics
Ruddick found inspiration for her understanding of work and its relation to politics in both the activity of reading Virginia Woolf and in the content of what she read. Ruddick spent a great deal of time in the 1970s studying Woolf. She scoured the novels and spent hours with the unpublished memoirs. Ruddick credits Woolf with helping her to see that “work,” as it was understood socially, was a limited and limiting concept. She came to realize that in her own work she “did not so much have to find a professional niche as to relinquish the ideal of professionalism” (Reference Ruddick, Ruddick and Daniels1977, 142); reading Woolf was part of her own “deprofessionalization” and was instrumental in understanding that work should not be separated or compartmentalized from other aspects of one's life. Although she began studying Woolf as a sort of “private holiday,” she came to understand it as work that she embraced and relished, integrating it into her life as a mother, philosopher, wife, and teacher (Reference Ruddick, Ruddick and Daniels1977, 143).
Ruddick's personal experience regarding work translated to her understanding of how philosophical and political commitments could be integrated in one's life. Woolf, and subsequently Ruddick, saw the connections between the private lives of women and political tyranny. As Ruddick explains, “I found that Virginia Woolf had a profound and comprehensive political vision of the connections between patriarchy, violence, tyranny, and economic oppression . . . . Virginia Woolf's politics began to shape and inspire my ‘real,’ officially sanctioned philosophical work” (Reference Ruddick, Ruddick and Daniels1977, 143; see also Reference Ruddick1989, 247). Following Woolf, Ruddick also saw the positive potential of linking politics of nondomination in the family to larger sociopolitical relations. Subjection and servility within the family, accordingly, is connected with the subjection of women and other politically disempowered groups in political relations. These relations of domination are also connected to a permissive attitude toward violence according to Ruddick. When women are reduced to servility, violence seeps into relationships (Reference Ruddick1989, 251; see also 220). One way to think about the lessons Ruddick pulled from Woolf is as a transformation of the feminist dictum “the personal is political”: Ruddick, under Woolf's guidance, asks us to flip it to read “the political is personal.” This connection between servility, the lack of work of one's own, and violence or, on the contrary, self-respect, integrative work, and peaceful nondomination becomes central to Ruddick's understanding of solidarity.
The Professional Model: Compartmentalizing Work
Woolf taught Ruddick the difference between what she calls the “professional model” of work, which requires an all-consuming attention that “cripples those who succumb to it” and what might be called a “living model of integrative work” (my term) that is rife with tensions between attending to others’ needs, personal desires for fulfillment, and social obligations and pleasures but nevertheless never allows the projects of personal fulfillment to be so all-consuming as to block out other elements of life. Nor does it allow the relations that tug on one's desires and obligations to block out the possibility for personal fulfillment. Ruddick does not mean solely “professional work” in the “professional model,” although that was the type of work that she pursued. Rather, she meant all work that was organized by society as activity done outside, separate from the life in the home, in contrast to family life, or otherwise demanding separation from other fulfilling activities.Footnote 1 Work receives a wage and is usually the answer to the question “what do you do?” Activity performed in the home, according to this socially determined conception of work, is simply excluded from the category of work. Women of Ruddick's class, race, and generation, schooled in gender roles, were often understood as not doing work.Footnote 2 Ruddick highlights the differences between work that takes one away from other sorts of pursuits that are (or ought to be) seen as also central to one's life and offers a new conception of work that incorporates—albeit uneasily—all of the various aspects of one's interests or within which one finds satisfactions, fulfillment, or identity.Footnote 3
The socially determined structure of work presumes its opposition to home life. This work is work that requires all-consuming focus or dedication while other aspects of life are separated or compartmentalized. Two clear problems emerge with the socially determined structure of work: (1) the inherent class system as well as a class bias, and (2) its patriarchal grounding. Socially determined work privileges certain types of work although not necessarily only those types that are otherwise called “professional.” By positing work as the source of value and identity, the socially determined model validates a class system that measures personal worth by the wage earned and the worker's distance from manual labor. Aptly describing it as a “myth,” Ruddick argues that middle-class children were taught that the only desirable work was “professional”:
… the worker essentially self-employed and therefore independent. Such work required training, earned status and money, but was free from the taint of commercialism. It was interesting, of use to others, performed outside the house. It took up most of one's days, earned the right to service at home and respect in the community. The work was far too absorbing, far too public, to be compatible with the Woman's Life Plan (Reference Ruddick, Ruddick and Daniels1977, 132).
The myth is not only that the ideal was out of reach for the majority of poor and working-class people; it was also out of reach for most middle-class youth as well. Most professionals were (are) not as independent, respected, and useful as the myth promised. The fact that most people do not have access to the sort of work that allows for independence and earns status and money does not detract from the social pull of the professional model of work. Moreover, in order for some people to pursue the myth, other people are often forced into unjust working conditions. The socially determined structure of work demands all-consuming focus that bifurcates existence and encourages the abandonment of familial obligations and leisure time activities. If there is no spouse to do the domestic duties, other people are hired, usually at much lower wages, to care for children, cook meals, clean laundry, and plan social gatherings. Needless to say, these others are also asked or economically required to dedicate themselves to their work at the expense of other activities they would like to pursue, including caring for children and cooking meals for family and friends. In critiquing the myth of professionalism, then, Ruddick critiques all types of work that demand compartmentalization and the fracturing of the self, including unjust working conditions and unpaid domestic obligations.
Ruddick notes that, for her generation, work as socially determined was gendered. Her essay, “A Work of One's Own,” tells the story of her childhood inculcation in “the Plan”: the socially prescribed destiny for women of her class, race, and social location to care for a family and home. There was something amiss about the structure of the work—not the work itself—that posed the problem. Ruddick's contribution to Working it Out is a clever exposition of the tension she felt between the so-called women's work that she both knew she was expected to do and yet also often wanted to do. She enjoyed spending time with her children and cooking good meals. The patriarchal prescriptions that describe this work as “women's work” can also taint the very enjoyment of it or block some people from having the time and resources to engage in it. In addition to being gendered, the professional model of work harms individuals and relations because it forces the fracturing of the self.
Ruddick sums up the problem with failures of the socially determined conception of work in the following passage. Notice that it highlights a sort of vicious circle. Society structures work such that mothering is excluded and thereby fails to provide avenues for fostering self-respect. But self-respect is needed to participate in socially determined work (Reference Ruddick, Ruddick and Daniels1977; see also Hanigsberg and Ruddick Reference Hanigsberg and Ruddick1999, xi).
So long as the social conditions of motherhood are inimical to self-respect, the desire to mother will be threatening. So long as profound desires are threatening and therefore disavowed, experience is impoverished. In my case, so long as that impoverishment continued, I could not have the self-love necessary for work of my own. Nor could I, without the self-respect of shared responsibility in my intimate, private life, gain the self-respect necessary for me to act with some freedom in the public world (Reference Ruddick, Ruddick and Daniels1977, 145).
Subtly, Ruddick reconceives work in such a way as to not only overthrow the distinction between doing “professional work” and doing “women's work,” but also to subvert the distinction so as to make doing “professional work” in accordance with the socially determined model of work deficient. Her account is punctuated by her own struggle with the expectations of compartmentalization of the various aspects of her own life. Ruddick recognized the practical benefits of dividing work; as she says, “It is by no means easy to fulfill duties and experience the pleasures of family life when absorbed by demanding work” (Reference Ruddick, Ruddick and Daniels1977, 144). Yet the challenge of blending demanding work with the pleasures of family life precisely characterizes her reconceptualization of work. She envisions, in other words, work that integrates all that one wants to do—including caring for loved ones, performing a rewarding task for society, and socializing with friends—with all that one has to do, which is often described in the same terms.Footnote 4
The Living Model: Integrative Work
The first element of Ruddick's living model of integrative work is that work ought to be understood in its role as a life-sustaining compulsion. She describes a process in which she had to learn how to work, meaning “that there is in … daily life a satisfactory predominance of activity over passivity, of reality over fantasy, of creation over conception.” To this she added, “It continues to astonish me that the simple human ability to work brings so much additional pleasure, order, solace, and meaning to my life” (Reference Ruddick, Ruddick and Daniels1977, 130). Work of this sort cannot be separated from or compartmentalized as distinct from home and family life but is rather integrated into one's life and being. The Marxian connection is worth noting here; labor is central to existence, not a drudgery to be avoided or an all-consuming endeavor that robs the individual of other valuable aspects of life.Footnote 5 A writer or philosopher, like Ruddick herself, who works with the flood of ideas and the intense desire to craft, convey, or communicate while also being pulled by personal and familial needs and desires demonstrates work of this sort. Ruddick includes all forms of work that are freely chosen; living work relies not on the form of work but on the structural relation with the network of all one's desires. Work as a life-sustaining compulsion is not performed in an all-consuming manner of being “at work,” requiring one's undivided attention, but is performed as “working” understood as a process that one shapes and that shapes one without overpowering all the other important activities of life. Ruddick invites workers to accept and integrate those aspects of caring for the home and family that offer fulfillment and fulfill obligations. Reconceptualizing work in this way sets up a new juxtaposition; instead of comparing work outside the home with domestic obligations, Ruddick asks us to compare the compartmentalization conception of work with the integrative conception.
A central idea of living work is figuring out how to live with the conflict between demands on one's time from a variety of sources. Rather than a dichotomy between work life and home life, a living model of work recognizes that a person might both want to spend time with friends and to resent the intrusion on the solitude—solitude that is needed for certain types of work—that friends entail. The key is accepting those mixed or contradictory feelings rather than trying to block out one or the other or, worse, disparaging those elements of home life that appear to distract or detract from so-called work life. As she explains, referencing the living integrative work of feminist activists,
It is difficult for most of us to maintain these several convictions simultaneously: to value women's work while trying to change women's lives; to portray the poignancy and wealth of family love while insisting on women's right to self-absorbing, demanding projects; to write and work for oneself while refusing to turn a deaf ear and blind eye to traditions of womanly service (Ruddick and Daniels Reference Ruddick and Daniels1977, xxxii).
The socially determined model of work asks for sacrifice; the living model is content with the occasional missed deadline and very real frustration with multiple and conflicting passions.
Conceptualizing work according to the living model places the sources of self-respect in the relational self, not in the external work that society separates from family and friends. Understanding the place of the living model of work in Ruddick's philosophy is crucial to understanding her discussion of women's resistance and feminist politics. Self-respect that is conditional on social structures of work is an individualist model. Individual women who participate in socially determined work might gain some element of self-respect, but they would fail to see any political connections with other women who continue to struggle. The self-respect that emerges from the living model of work is, in contrast, relational. It is because one feels pulled to be with children, family, and friends along with (and in spite of) the desire for some other self-fulfilling activity that one comes to see oneself as connected, one's struggle is connected with the struggles of others for the right to living work, and one is worthy of respect.
PEACEMAKERS AND MOTHERS
Often Ruddick's nuanced account of the work of mothers as peacemakers is reduced to either (a) a reclamation or revaluation of women's work that nevertheless maintains the dichotomy between work in the home and work outside the home, or (b) an essentialist account of mothers as inherently peaceful (e.g., Code Reference Code1991, 92; Tong Reference Tong2009, 324–28; cf. DiQuinzio Reference DiQuinzio1999, ch. 5). Neither of these accurately conveys the extent of her argument. The integrative model of work responds to the first misreading, and, as I demonstrate in this section, the peacemaking mother, properly understood as an example of integrative work, addresses the second. Ruddick very carefully notes that mothers may be male or female and that women too have supported war efforts, employed violence against their children, or otherwise contradicted any claim to inherent peacefulness (Reference Ruddick1989; Reference Ruddick1997, 272; O'Reilly and Ruddick Reference O'Reilly, Ruddick and O'Reilly2009, 26–27). The work of mothering, which she explicates in Maternal Thinking, provides tools that are useful well beyond the private life of mothers. For those already predisposed to peace, the work of mothers supports the work of peacemakers. The mother as peacemaker adopts mothering and peacemaking as living work and integrates them with all other activities in life. At times there will be tensions, but there will also be fulfillment in acting on one's compulsion to work. Of course, there is little doubt that Ruddick's selection of “mother” and “mothering” for the work that she describes is problematic.Footnote 6 In addition to the problem that the term itself is gendered, far too frequently Ruddick follows discussion of “mothers” with comments about “women,” and this leads to the difficulty of maintaining her claim that when they engage in certain activities, men, too, are mothers. Further, as Alison Bailey aptly points out, Ruddick often speaks with a voice that universalizes the mothering of middle- or upper-class white women. The importance of recognizing the diversity of experiences and requirements of mothering is lost in these instances (Bailey Reference Bailey1994; Reference Bailey1995). I will return to this point, as this problem in Ruddick's terminology serves as an obstacle to feminist solidarity as well.
For some of the contributors of the edited collection Working it Out, “Politics—the attempt to redress social and economic inequities—is the work. And the work—a thesis, a radio program, a painting, a quilt, or a play, is politics” (Ruddick and Daniels Reference Ruddick and Daniels1977, xxix). The peacemaker relies on the living model of work because peacemaking permeates all aspects of life. A person cannot engage in violence in one sphere and hope to be washed clean of its implications in another, as the socially determined model allows. Peacemakers know that the actions (and inactions) in one part of life are not separable from those in another. Violence in politics could not subsist with caring labor. Further, to respond to opponents in a manner that opposes their logic as well as their assault, one must respond nonviolently. To respond violently is to accept the logic of the opponent and the separation of work from other aspects of life.
The work of mothers hones particular skills that may be useful in countless situations. For instance, Ruddick suggests that mothering requires and practices skills like “attentiveness, realism, and a welcoming attitude toward change” (Reference Ruddick1989, 220). These skills are invaluable in other situations, such as political activism. Moreover, such characteristics as “resilient cheerfulness” and “a tolerance of ambiguity and ambivalence” are particularly useful for nonviolent activism (Reference Ruddick1989, 220). The work of one activity integrates with the work of another. Ruddick was aware of the fact that, as currently structured, many mothers—perhaps even the majority of mothers—were unable to do the work of mothering as well as any other self-fulfilling work they desired to do because of social structures and economic limitations. This is one reason she proposes such a radical transformation work; it is not enough to provide avenues for some privileged women to participate in socially determined work. Doing so leaves intact the class- and gender-biased elements of socially determined work. Living work requires a much more comprehensive restructuring of society to allow for the integration of so many aspects of a person's life as well as the inherent contradictions or tensions that such an integration may cause.
In the final chapter of Maternal Thinking, Ruddick demonstrates her feminist maternal peace politics reliant on the living model of work. One can see it employed in the following juxtaposition of the work of mothers and war:
Wherever there are wars, children are hurt, hungry, and frightened; homes are burned, crops destroyed, families scattered. The daily practice and long-term aims of women's caring labor are all threatened. Though mothers may be warlike, war is their enemy. Where there is peace, mothers engage in work that requires nonviolent battle, fighting while resisting the temptation to assault or abandon opponents (Reference Ruddick1989, 220).
Notice that Ruddick is not denying women's role in war or that men, too, can work for peace. On the contrary, in order to understand this passage, one needs to understand what Ruddick means by the work that requires nonviolence. As we saw, the socially determined model of work allowed for, or even required, one to compartmentalize various aspects of one's life. Work is separate and distinct from home life. Work of that sort requires one's all-consuming attention or relies on compartmentalization in order to preserve certain illusions about one's life. War relies on the socially determined model of work: one leaves the home—including friends and other aspects of life—literally and figuratively.Footnote 7 In contrast, a living model of work, the one used in Ruddick's account of the work of mothers, lives with the tensions between the caring labor, the desire to do caring labor, and engagement in politics. Challenges to either mothering or peacemaking—for example, government policies that keep a mother from being able to do her work or nationalistic attitudes toward war making—inspire an appropriate reactionary anger. In order to live with this tension, nonviolence is required. This is because violence is in contradiction to caring labor. To do nonviolent caring labor while engaging in politics on the living model of work requires a refusal to accept compartmentalizing the activities of caring and of politics.
Speaking of the “mythical peacemaking mother”—an implicit acknowledgement of the difficulty of the living model of integrative work for mothers and peacemakers—who adopts the alternative logic rooted in the living model of work, Ruddick explains,
She represents a practice whose aims and strategies contradict those of war, which, like mothering, is also an organized human activity with moral pretensions. It is this potentially painful and lively contradiction between war and mothering as human activities that might motivate individual mothers to resist. Similarly, the principles of nonviolence by which ordinary mothers judge themselves govern a practice; it is the nonviolent aspirations of the practice, persisting through continuous and sometimes catastrophic individual failure, that suggest a wider, more public peace (Reference Ruddick1989, 221).Footnote 8
Ruddick holds that “ordinary mothers” are governed by the principles of nonviolence. Out of the work of mothering, a living model of work that is full of frustrations as well as joys, a commitment to principles of nonviolence consistent with the work itself develops. As the passage indicates, individual mothers might recognize the contradictions inherent between war and mothering and be motivated to resist. That is the crucial moment when the work of mothers becomes the source of collective, political action.
FEMINIST SOLIDARITY
Solidarity, too, is a lesson Ruddick draws from Woolf. As she says, “Virginia Woolf taught me to say ‘we’ and mean women, to say ‘we’ are different and to value differences. She envisioned a ‘society of outsiders,’ a society of people who are ‘shut out’ or ‘shut up’ because they are women” (Ruddick Reference Ruddick, Ascher, DeSalvo and Ruddick1993, 138; see also Reference Ruddick1997, 268, 273). Woolf meant that women's fate excluded them from military activity, which she described as masculine. Ruddick thinks that being “outside” might also be chosen (Reference Ruddick1997, 273). Within the socially determined, bifurcated model of work, the individual struggle to work and the anger one experiences when one is excluded or prohibited from working create the conditions for being an “outsider.” From this outsider standpoint,Footnote 9 new possibilities for structuring society are imaginable. Ruddick's account of living work comes from this standpoint, and, she argues, the struggle to achieve the conditions that would allow one to engage in living work may serve as an impetus for collective political action, to say “we” and value differences even as we seek connections.
Feminist solidarity, according to Ruddick, seeks to “identify with women's culturally specific struggles to work, care, and enjoy, to think and speak freely, and to resist abuse” (Reference Ruddick1989, 240–41; see also Ruddick Reference Ruddick2002, 216). Given her rich reimagined account of work, the other aspects are refinements and details of living work: to “care, and enjoy, think and speak freely, and to resist abuse.” They explicate what is meant by work even while they may also be understood independently of it. The struggle to work is the struggle to live and act on deeply felt passions or compulsions; it is an existential struggle, not merely a practical struggle to engage in wage labor outside the home. Feminist solidarity, then, connects feminists in a political movement to be. According to Ruddick, “As women, or in solidarity with them, feminists struggle against any social, racial, economic, or physical abuse that threatens women's capacity to work and to love” (Reference Ruddick1989, 235). In other words, she sees her account of solidarity as reliant on a struggle for integrative work, which directly challenges the class and gender biases of the socially determined model of work. Solidarity is a struggle to work in the sense of work as a life-sustaining compulsion, fraught with contradictions but integrating all the various aspects of the self. As an ideal, solidarity serves as a means of orienting one's attention and energy; Ruddick asks participants to coalesce in solidarity not against a common enemy or in light of a shared experience but through the recognition that the framework of our struggles to work offers a source for collective action even though the particularities of our individual and culturally specific struggles will be diverse and perhaps even at odds.
Feminist solidarity offers an ideal based on “identifying with women's struggles” that recognizes that not all women will participate and that some men may be involved. Although at times Ruddick appears to employ a notion of solidarity more akin to sympathy or empathy for victims, as when she suggests the peacemaker stand “in solidarity with war's victims” (Reference Ruddick1989, 157), it is clear that she means solidarity to be a moral-political ideal that forms the framework for collective action. Consider the following passage:
The ideal of solidarity does not reflect an attitude feminists have to any or all women. Most obviously, the subjects of feminist solidarity are women who suffer abuse from individual men or from sexist and heterosexist institutions. Second, whatever their individual experiences, feminists tend to ally themselves politically with women who are abused—out of whatever combination of class, race, and sexual oppression—as birthgivers, mothers, or female kin. Solidarity extends indefinitely with different emphases depending on the feminist. But it does not extend to ‘women’ in general, but rather to women in particular situations of struggle (Reference Ruddick1989, 240).
There are a number of things to note in this passage. First, according to Ruddick, solidarity is an ideal. That is, it serves as a goal; the aspirations for that goal guide political action. Secondly, Ruddick is careful to distinguish between an “attitude” of solidarity among women and a feminist solidarity. This is an important distinction that all too often gets ignored. An attitudinal solidarity among women is merely a descriptive unity based on commonality. Feminist solidarity, in contrast, is a political alliance that Ruddick says forms in response to the recognition of abuse or limiting institutions, or, rather, it forms among those struggling politically to do the work they want to do. The implication in the above passage is that feminist solidarity is a coalition for women, “women in particular situations of struggle.” However, her “imaginative collective” acting in solidarity need not be constituted solely by women; it develops from women's resistance movements (which are clearly constituted by women), feminist political movements (which need not be constituted solely of women), and ordinary angry mothers (who may be male or female so long as they do the activity of mothering). This unlikely alliance faces many obstacles before becoming feminist solidarity, and, with her notion of the “imaginative collective,” Ruddick appears to acknowledge that it may remain out of reach even while it serves as a motivating ideal.
One of the chief obstacles may be the very different experiences of women doing the work of mothering. Bailey (Reference Bailey1994; Reference Bailey1995) rightly points out that Ruddick offers the acknowledgement that the work of mothering differs across cultures (as well as race, ethnicity, and class) but does not substantiate the differences. In fact, as Bailey argues, Ruddick appears to speak with two voices that frequently become entwined. One voice is her experience as a middle-class white woman mothering; the other voice is the “universal” voice of all mothers. The two are conflated in the exposition of practical knowledge in Maternal Thinking, according to Bailey. She offers an important means of problematizing Ruddick's presentation. Bailey focuses on the first part of Maternal Thinking, wherein Ruddick articulates specific epistemological resources of maternal practices and the articulation of the “practicalist conception of truth.” These, as Bailey notes, vary tremendously, but Ruddick speaks, at times, as if they are universal to all mothers: “While she [Ruddick] seems to recognize the diversity of mothering, acknowledging that maternal work is shaped by race, ethnicity, class, culture, and sexual orientation, she also insists that all mothers are involved in the same ‘forms of life’—preservation of life, nurturing, and social training” (Bailey Reference Bailey1994, 192). The result is that the work of mothering Ruddick describes bears the marks of race, class, ethnicity, and nationality privilege. Bailey argues that Ruddick's account fails to accurately capture the work of mothers with diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds, which further limits the applicability of her maternal thinking, the epistemological standpoint that emerges from the work of mothering she describes. This critique affects Ruddick's account of peace politics as well: “Both racial-ethnic mothers and white mothers may share their anger over the horrors and wastes of their government's preparations for war, but their critiques of dominant/military ways of thinking will be different because of their obviously dissimilar relationships to white men and political power structures” (1994, 195; cf. Callahan and Tuana Reference Callahan and Tuana2004; O'Reilly and Ruddick Reference O'Reilly, Ruddick and O'Reilly2009, 25, 28, 30). Bailey's concerns are well placed concerning Ruddick's standpoint epistemology. Moreover, the discussion of feminist solidarity needs diverse perspectives as well in order to maintain a critical attitude regarding power or relations to power that individual participants bring to the coalition (Scholz Reference Scholz2008; Weber Reference Weber2006). Reading the mother/peacemaker as an example of living work and, further, reading the struggle to work as the unifying element to solidaristic politics suggests that some of the concerns regarding the specifics in Ruddick's account of mothering might be bracketed. Struggles to work, not identification as mothers, unites us. This is not to deny that the work of mothering, as well as the work of peacemaking, will vary depending on a number of factors, including the mother or peacemaker's social position in contexts of domination and overall relation to structures of power. Reconceptualizing work as living work transforms solidarity understood as “culturally specific struggles to work”; participants in the struggle will understand living work from their particularity.
Feminist solidarity unites three differently motivated groups in an “imaginative collective.” The first two, women's politics of resistance and feminist politics, “strengthen the peacefulness of mothers” (1989, 222) by actively working in collective politics.Footnote 10 These two movements often get conflated in literature on feminism, peace politics, and resistance (Kotef Reference Kotef2011, 556), but Ruddick shows that there is good reason to keep them distinct. Joined with the third group—ordinary angry moms—feminist solidarity forms.
A “women's politics of resistance” is classed as such according to three characteristics: “its participants are women, they explicitly invoke their culture's symbols of femininity, and their purpose is to resist certain practices or policies of their governors” (Reference Ruddick1989, 222). As Ruddick explains, the women's politics of resistance is in many ways grounded in women's traditional work. Societal structures encourage them to “take responsibility for the tasks of caring labor,” but certain policies or actions keep them from being able to act on “their right or capacity to do their work” (Reference Ruddick1989, 223–24; see also Reference Ruddick1997, 269). This inspires resistance. In resisting the policies of the local governing body or the state, women's resistance movements affirm their right to engage in the living work of raising children and caring for the home; their actions do not challenge the social structure (or their socially determined work in the home) but do assert their right to work that is integrated with all other activities of existence. Women's politics of resistance of this sort encourages women to explore their “culture's symbols of femininity” (Ruddick Reference Ruddick1989, 223; see also Aharoni Reference Aharoni2011, 397). It also makes some feminists uneasy because it appears to reaffirm a gendered division of labor, but there is another lesson Ruddick would like us to pull from women's resistance movements. She discusses the Madres of Argentina and a similar resistant movement in Chile. These groups challenge the policies that “disappeared” their children. The absence of their work—the ordinary tasks of tending the needs of others—became “starkly visible through the eerie ‘disappearance’” (Reference Ruddick1989, 228). The integrative work is further emphasized in Arahoni's use of Ruddick's theory of women's resistance movements to discuss women's contributions to informal peace processes: “resistance, community work, and grassroots activism have been perceived as enabling women to formulate new priorities and challenge existing concepts of security, human rights, justice and reconstruction” (Aharoni Reference Aharoni2011, 397). In other words, the struggle to work according to the integrative model reveals how issues of justice, human rights, and security are tied into both domestic politics and day-to-day living. The women's resistance is an example of living work: their caring labor is incorporated into their political activism. As they resist practices or policies of their governments or other political bodies that restrict their ability to do the work culture tells them they ought to do, they also transform those very cultural systems, the policies and practices that maintain them, and themselves. Ruddick makes this point about personal and political transformation explicit, saying, “Women who risk ostracism and physical danger, yet act as women in public spaces, transform the passions of loyalty, attachment, and loss into political action. Women who sport with images of femininity and propriety, mock the authorities they are meant to serve, the customs they are meant to preserve” (Reference Ruddick1997, 270–71).
The second movement, feminist politics, refers “to a politics that is dedicated to transforming those social and domestic arrangements that deliberately or unwittingly penalize women because of their sex” and focuses “on the ways that gender—the social construction of masculinity and femininity—organizes political, personal, and intellectual life” (Reference Ruddick1989, 234). Feminist politics, hence, differs from women's resistance movements insofar as it challenges the social structures that determine women's place in society. The two movements at times can be at odds, as one appears to affirm the gendered social structure, and the other appears to attempt to deconstruct it. Ruddick recognizes this tension but sees the possibility of uniting in solidarity through recognition that our particular struggles to work share a similar framework.
Ordinary angry mothers, the third group in Ruddick's imaginative collective, advocate for their families, their children, and their right to do the work they seek. They talk back to authority figures like teachers and coaches who expect them to timidly accept whatever the authority says. Ordinary angry mothers often experience the reverberations of their “stubborn decision” from children and the authorities. But they are also powerful figures who speak out and speak up declaring forcefully, “let me do my work.” When these three join forces “acting together” and “walk out of their homes to appropriate spaces they never were meant to occupy,” they become a movement. Ruddick calls this the “imaginative collective” of mothers, feminists, and women in resistance” (Reference Ruddick1989, 244), noting that although the various elements might frequently be at odds with each other, together they become an imaginative conjunction creating a “human respecting politics of peace” (Reference Ruddick1989, 245).
Ruddick's analysis of women's resistance movements, feminist politics, and ordinary angry mothers encourages us to see ourselves and our struggles, especially our struggles to work, as connected. Solidarity further demonstrates the need to fight for women's right to engage in living work in the fight against war and tyranny. In its broadest conception, this might simply mean that the fight against tyranny ought to include the fight against sexism, but given Ruddick's respect for women who do not identify with feminism or who willingly embrace the work society specifies for them, it is more accurate to say that war and tyranny contradict women's right to the living model of work and that, therefore, the struggles to end the former entail the struggles for the latter.
EXTENDING RUDDICK‘S FEMINIST SOLIDARITY
Building solidarity on struggles to work allows for its limitless extension, according to Ruddick. Once again, the intersection of mothers and peacemakers serves as her primary example; by attempting to integrate their work, mothers and peacemakers experience the struggle out of which is born solidaristic relations: “Coming to have a maternal feminist and antimilitarist consciousness is the experience of coming to know what violence does to one's children and to oneself, as victim or perpetrator, and then casting one's lot in solidarity with women who resist violence” (Ruddick Reference Ruddick1989, 244). That is, the work of the feminist peacemaker mother demonstrates the possibilities of feminist solidarity.
Ruddick saw the possibility of a transnational and transcultural solidarity (Reference Ruddick1989, 239); she explicitly mentions it in the context of her discussion of feminist politics. The solidarity, she says, is among mothers—all those people who do the work of mothering (Reference Ruddick1989, 239; see also 243). Emphasizing work rather than mothering opens the way for a nonessentialist account of political solidarity: coalitions form around struggles to work rather than identities as mothers (Callahan and Tuana 2009; O'Reilly and Ruddick Reference O'Reilly, Ruddick and O'Reilly2009, 27). Feminist solidarities favor “a closer look at what women actually suffer and how they act” and, according to Ruddick (Reference Ruddick1989, 240), are capable of uniting people in struggle across national and state boundaries. Recall that Ruddick is using “feminist” here to indicate the aim or goal of solidarity as focused on women's needs, not to delineate the group as a group of women.
Ruddick's decision to use the terminology of mothering, albeit explicitly detached from gender, remains problematic to the political projects of a transnational feminist solidarity. The richer understanding of a living model of integrative work unpacked here, however, provides at least some way to think through her theory of political solidarity without the strong attachment to that terminology and, I hope, with a greater appreciation for the variety of work lives possible in culturally specific contexts. Nevertheless, some of those culturally specific needs and desires for work may be informed by oppressive social systems and global structures. Two issues are worth noting: (1) Individual preferences may be shaped by oppressive conditions such that acting on those preferences actually upholds or maintains systems of oppression. (2) Some culturally specific preferences rely heavily on privilege that entails the exploitation of others within and across borders. The first of these raises the question of adaptive preferences (Khader Reference Khader2011; Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum2001, ch. 2), and Ruddick does not delve into this aspect of preference theory. On the contrary, she validates the choices mothers make insofar as they are nonviolent, integrative elements of the individual's existence. She also acknowledges, however, the transformative effects of political engagement, and so might allow that some preferences are shaped by oppressive conditions and become changed during active resistance. The second issue that Ruddick fails to account for and that may pose a greater obstacle to transnational or transcultural feminist solidarity are the relationships of exploitation that may go unquestioned or unnoticed as some women—privileged women—pursue their integrative work. This problem echoes the class and gender bias problems of the socially determined structure of work. When privileged women hire other women to care for their children and homes—perhaps even removing the caregiver from her own home or country of origin and away from her family—they create care chains that further entrench divisions among those struggling to work rather than uniting in solidarity in that struggle.
The means of solidarity are also important for reinforcing the values of living work and for bridging national, racial, and ethnic divides. She describes two aspects of protest that are demonstrated by the Madres and relevant to feminist solidarity transnationally and transculturally. The first is “a commitment to non-violence, and particularly a relinquishing of revenge” (Reference Ruddick1997, 271). The second, to “undercut a racialist distinction between enemy and friend” (Reference Ruddick1997, 271), aims to build connections among peoples while protesting governments, international bodies, or policies. In other words, protest—whether for peacemaking or for solidarity of another sort—is among individual people, not groups or nations. Unity through the struggle to work given particular contexts and diverse contingencies is meant to connect divisions of race, class, and nation, but the means employed must reflect that commitment to solidarity across differences.
The first step in expanding feminist solidarity is to break down the ideological power of nations and national borders. Ruddick suggests that, “to the extent that a mother herself acquires the ideal of solidarity, the purview of her lucid knowledge will extend to ‘other’ women, including often mothers who are targets of her own government's violence. Solidarity with women in struggle tends to undercut military loyalty to states” (Reference Ruddick1989, 240). National borders are only one obstacle. People often experience strong allegiances to their own people, culture, ethnic or linguistic group, or religion. These allegiances may be valued more than the ideal of solidarity is able to persuade. That is, even if mothers at a distance experience connections with each other in their struggles to work and avoid abuse, that does not mean that they will be willing to sacrifice allegiance to their own nation or culture—even their own abusive nation—in the name of such solidarity. Ruddick's transcultural feminist solidarity might have to be a thin political solidarity allowing for short-lived unities for particular causes without strong ties of identification in other sorts of struggles.
The Madres of Argentina and the women in Chilean protest movements demonstrate the possibility for feminist solidarity that extends beyond borders (Reference Ruddick1989, 232; see also Reference Ruddick1997, 269–71). These women did not seek to transcend their particular situation or to establish universal principles of connection; rather they acted on their particularity and extended what Ruddick calls mothering to “include sustaining and protecting any people whose lives are blighted by violence” (Reference Ruddick1989, 232). This only makes sense in the context of Ruddick's reconceptualized notion of work. There is no claim to commonality or even similarity. Instead there is common struggle for the right to do the work—the living model of work—of which victims of abuse, violence, and tyranny are deprived. Feminist solidarity, as Ruddick conceives it, is a dynamic process rife with contention as much as with cooperation. Participants “respond in individual situations from their particular endangered or safe, embedded or distant, relation to violence” (Reference Ruddick1997, 280). Ruddick's account further seeks to build connections through struggles to work with the cultural, social, and dispositional differences among women rather than trying to overcome them.
Importantly, feminist solidarity extending across borders differs from care ethics in the international arena (Held Reference Held2006; Kyle Reference Kyle2013; Tronto Reference Tronto, Whisnant and DesAutels2008). The latter is an expansion of empathy or care; Held (Reference Held2006, 17) considers expanding care more promising than “rational recognition” of the rights of others. Feminist solidarity, in contrast, displays both a political urgency and a driving goal; in the case of Ruddick's feminist solidarity, it is the pursuit of integrative work. The expansion of care, in contrast, aims not at a particular political goal but rather to establish the conditions of care and mutuality on which standard international political goals may be met, such as the respect for human rights. Kyle (Reference Kyle2013) offers Arendt's concept amor mundi, or care for the world, as an additional care ethic for global concerns in contrast to an expansion of interpersonal caring. Accordingly, care is directed at the whole world. Tronto's (Reference Tronto, Whisnant and DesAutels2008) account of expansive care for the purposes of peacekeeping comes close to Ruddick's feminist solidarity insofar as both emphasize the integration of various aspects of the self. For Tronto, one's body and one's environment are included in caring. Ruddick's feminist solidarity extended across borders is, in some ways, much more limited than all of these accounts of global care. Rather than uniting all humans or the entire world in care, Ruddick's transnational feminist solidarity unites those engaged in struggles to ensure the ability to work.
Ruddick's feminist solidarity shares many similarities with other contemporary theories of transnational feminist solidarity by positing solidarity in shared struggles. Her account can be seen as offering an important addition insofar as she understands the struggle as a struggle to work. This framework allows for, she suggests, connections from positions of particularity that value differences. In order for the struggle to work to function as a framework for transnational feminist solidarity, work must be understood according to the living model of work integrating relations with family and friends. It acknowledges the cultural specificity of the struggles of participants as well as respects their diverse and particular understandings of work. Although Ruddick's terminological choice of “mothering” poses limitations for her standpoint epistemology maternal thinking, I have suggested that recovering the importance of her reconceptualization of work opens the way for a reading of Ruddick's theory that augments contemporary theories of transnational and transcultural feminist solidarity.
