Mothering & Maternal Virtues

Rumsey discusses conceptions of mothering and maternal virtues in a book review of Ruddick's Maternal Thinking. According to Rumsey, Ruddick's definition of mothering is understood with reference to specific virtues that arise from maternal experience. Rumsey characterizes Ruddick's definition as normative and transformative (126) to the extent it is intended as a means of extrapolating from individual to social experience. However, at its core, the definition is connected to "the three basic demands all children present: preservation, nurturing growth, and training for social acceptability" (Rumsey 126). The mothering enterprise involves responding to these demands, with the first two demands engaged chiefly at the individual level, with the mother essentially placing the child's needs before her own, and the third at both individual and social levels, with the mother functioning as both a moral anchor a liaison between individual and the community. Rumsey says that only in regard to the third demand for

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esponsibility to care for the other . . . normally defined in terms of a social role . . . involving socially ascribed expectations" (31). They cannot seem to resist diminishing the centrality of physical maternal experience to emotional parental bonding; specifically, they say that breast feeding is by no means universally significant. Nevertheless, they caution that men should not "abdicate" nurturant activities just because women seem more at east in such roles, even as men do need to conceive of educational and disciplinary activity as fundamentally nurturant. These are views and analyses of modern parenting that conflict with Shorter's views of family relationships and child rearing practices of the traditional society. Shorter distinguishes between the modern and traditional perspectives of parenting by noting that the modern family unit is more insular vis-a-vis the community at large. In particular, the relationship between mother and child was transformed in the modern family unit, along with an emphasis on romantic courtship and the familial structure as based on emotion rather than production and reproduction for social purposes (Shorter 5). Individual maternal impulses, wherein "the infant came to be most important,"
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Approximate Word count = 1409
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)