ABSTRACT
But the family soon came to have its feminist defenders, and now a battle is brewing between those feminists who stand by the earlier critiques of the family and those who argue that we must reconsider the value of the family and motherhood for feminist consciousness. The “pro-family” feminists’ aim is both a practical and a theoretical one: practical insofar as they seek to wrest the defense of the family from the New Right (which they correctly perceive as having distorted and mystified the role of women as mothers and wives); and theoretical
insofar as they intend to reclaim mothering as a dimension of women’s experience and defend it as necessary for both gender identity and feminist political consciousness. Among these “pro-family” feminists, two are particularly important: Sara Ruddick and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Seizing upon the “social practice of mothering” and its attendant virtues and “metaphysical attitudes,” Sara Ruddick has sought to promote “maternal thinking” as an antidote to a maledominated culture and as an alternative vision of a “way to be” in the world. 3 Jean Bethke Elshtain challenges what she takes to be the matriphobia of the feminist movement by bringing out the political implications of maternal thinking and by attempting to restructure political consciousness on the basis of what she calls “social feminism.”4
