Caring

Gender-Sensitive Ethics

Peta Bowden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134784455
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In Caring, Peta Bowden extends and challenges recent debates on feminist ethics. She takes issue with accounts of the ethics of care that focus on alleged principles of caring rather than analysing caring in practice. Caring, Bowden argues, must be understood by 'working through examples'.
Following this approach, Bowden explores four main caring practices: mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship. Her analysis of the differences and similarities in these practices - their varying degrees of intimacy and reciprocity, formality and informality, vulnerability and choice - reveals the practical complexity of the ethics of care.
Caring recognizes that ethical practices constantly outrun the theories that attempt to explain them, and Bowden's unique approach provides major new insights into the nature of care without resorting to indiscriminate unitary models.
It will be essential reading for all those interested in ethics, gender studies, nursing and the caring professions.

Chapter 1

Mothering

I

Consideration of relationships between mothers and their children has been sadly missing from the traditional philosophical repertoire of ethical concerns. For those interested in the ethical potential of caring, however, mothering has been the source of continuous reflection and analysis. Maternal relationships are of fundamental importance in the present context for several reasons. First, as the very first human relationship that most persons experience, the mothering connection provides a privileged example of the possibilities of human connectedness. It has a pre-eminent role in the creation of new persons, in shaping their language and culture, and developing their morality as well as providing a stock of memories of caring on which they can draw in their ethical practices.¹ In terms of this reproductive and creative potential, mothering is the most fundamental of caring relations.

Second, and intimately connected with this notion of primacy there is the perception that mothering relationships express, at least symbolically, a way of mattering to another that represents something of an archetype for caring. Seen as the functionally necessary and natural realm of affection and love, enduring and unconditional openness, and responsiveness to the particular material, emotional and social needs of another person, mothering frequently carries the full weight of ideological constructions of caring. The very nature of caring seems to be produced in the connection between the apparently ultimate vulnerability of early childhood and the potentially perfect responsiveness of mothers. Nel Noddings, for example, spells out what she means by caring through repeated reference to the ways mothers care for their children.² Similarly, Virginia Held uses mothering relations as the central model for her ethics of care.³ The present investigation, in its move towards examining the variety of caring relations, questions the power of these constructions and thereby seeks to loosen the ties of their claims.

Third, mothering relationships are of direct interest to the larger project of this enquiry into the ethical import of caring because of their explicit ‘bio-metaphysical’ idiosyncrasy with respect to conventional ethical claims.⁴ For the peculiar quality of selfhood that characterizes the relationship of mothers to their children – the ‘binary–unity’ of self so aptly described by Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi⁵ – exposes the absurdity of the universal claims of more traditional moral philosophies based on codifications of the utility or the rights of individuals. In contrast to the singular and autonomous selves of that tradition,⁶ the gradual development of first bodily and later social individuation of children with respect to their mothers suggests the notion of selves that are simultaneously two and one, mother and child in varying degrees of relationship to each other. The complexity of this dynamic process of relatedness undermines the universality of many established understandings of personal possibilities. Hence, conceptions that set ideas of dependency and interdependency in opposition to those of autonomy and independence, or juxtapose courses of creativity and transformation against those of replication and transmission become patently inadequate.⁷

Mothers commonly describe the bewildering experience of their relationships to their children in terms that confound classic individualism: an extension of self that is not yet sell a sense of being in two places, or being two persons, at the same time, or of not knowing whether one is mother or child.⁸ In addition, these blendings and dispersions of self are marked by continuous change through time as the relationship moves through different expressions of dependency and attachment. Thus mothering relations present a direct challenge to the structural forms of conventional moral theory and provide a powerful demonstration of the need for elaboration of the complexity of the moral domain.

For gender-sensitive ethical enquiry, mothering is also of particular importance. And in this respect, since Simone de Beauvoir’s ovarian work, debunking the mystique surrounding women’s ‘natural calling’, mothering has been the subject of widespread examination by theorists interested in problems of gender bias.⁹ The issue arises through women’s central physiological role in the bearing of children and our profound social implication in childrearing. In this interplay between the biological and the social, the relationship of women to mothering is doubly inscribed: not only are women actually involved in mothering practices, but the possibility of mothering is a central constitutive of women’s identities.

Whether we are actual mothers or not, the possibilities of our lives are inevitably touched by the deep cultural and biological relations that characteristically conspire to connect us, at least indirectly, with mothering practices. Though these connections may elicit a wide range of responses, from ecstatic identification, unreflective acceptance, questioning uncertainty to open hostility, it remains an unavoidable – if unconscious – frame of reference for women’s lives. Mothering is a realm of potentiality to which all women are in some way accountable. This is not to say that our lives are exclusively dominated by maternal concerns or our relationship to mothering; rather, the powerful association between the womanly and the maternal tends characteristically to demand a response. Thus it is that this gender-identifying activity and its specific demands on women’s lives have been and remain a key subject for enquiries committed to exploring themes related to gender sensitivity.

Recent feminist investigations of mothering raise two main types of ethical concerns. In the first instance, following de Beauvoir’s lead, theorists have questioned the ‘external’ context of values within which mothering relations are enacted. Feminists have examined the ways in which social, economic and political structures tend to reduce and constrain – or enlarge – the domain of mothering practices. Attention is thus focused on the ways in which women’s association with mothering has worked against or for us, constraining or enhancing our social and personal possibilities. Recognition of the role of socio-political forces in structuring the boundaries and expectations of maternal relationships has directed attention towards the needs and ethical possibilities of those participating in, or identified by, association with mothering, and towards questions about how alternative structures might nurture those needs. Concern for the personal well-being of mothers and their children, as well as the ways in which mothering practices standardly orchestrate concepts of – and possibilities for – women in general, becomes the central theme.

The second type of concern is connected with consideration of the distinctive values that emerge within mothering practices themselves: the kinds of virtues enacted in mothering relations, the ethical priorities and commitments they express, the possibilities and limitations of the values attached to those virtues. Attention is directed towards understanding the ethical import of a domain of human interaction that has been largely overlooked or diminished in favour of philosophical reflection on less personal and solicitous exchanges. While mothering relationships undoubtedly constitute a profoundly significant sphere of human interaction, the claim is that – typically – deliberation has been focused on the values inculcated in children, rather than the ‘internal’ values that mothering practices themselves display. As Sara Ruddick explains, ‘maternal thinking’ has tended to be ‘thinking about mothers and children by experts who hoped to be heard by mothers rather than to hear what mothers had to say’.¹⁰ The gender specificity that characterizes the realm of maternal relationships provides an additional impetus to these concerns because the central role of mothering in understandings of gender identity casts it as a source of a distinctive ‘women’s morality’ and consequently as the key either to women’s empowerment or to our subordination.

These complexly intertwined aspects of mothering make the understanding of maternal caring relations of central importance to understanding the ethics of caring itself, though not, I claim, of paradigmatic importance. In the following discussion I shall set out for view two different descriptions of maternal care, those of philosopher Sara Ruddick and sociologist Amy Rossiter. By consideration of the insights and necessary oversights of this very limited sample of uses of ‘mothering’, my aim is to make a beginning in the process of understanding this important example in the range of ethical practices we call caring.

II

Sara Ruddick’s landmark work on the concept of ‘maternal thinking’¹¹ is one of the most comprehensive discussions of the practices and ethical possibilities of the caring exemplified by mothering relationships. Ruddick attempts to ‘identify some of the specific metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities, and conceptions of virtue . . . that are called forth by the demands of children’ (MT 61), with the aim of ‘honouring’ ideals of reason that are shaped by responsibility and love rather than by emotional detachment, objectivity and impersonality. Her claim is that the practices arising from mothers’ responses to ‘the promise of birth’ have the potential to generate and sustain a set of priorities, attitudes, virtues and beliefs that inform an ethics of care and a politics of peace. Her project of giving voice to the ethical import of mothers’ commitments is thus also a critique of the philosophical tradition that pursues a transparent distinction between reason and emotion, a calculus of ethical decisionism, and, more specifically, the reckonings of ‘just wars’.

The universal claims concerning non-violence and peace that Ruddick draws from her analysis of maternal thinking are problematic for the present investigation. But despite my intent of undoing precisely these kinds of universalist pretensions I want to sidestep this problem for the moment to consider Ruddick’s analysis at the level of its relevance to mothering relations themselves. My immediate concern is not to challenge her universalist move directly, but to investigate the distinctive kinds of caring that mothering relations may exhibit and the ways they contribute to understanding the concept of care. By pointing to the range and complexity of ethical concerns involved in different practices of caring in this way, my aim is to show that they defy the types of universalizations that Ruddick makes. It is, therefore, Ruddick’s description of the particular characteristics of mothering relations, and not her general prescriptions, that are of interest.

‘To be a “mother”’, says Ruddick, ‘is to take upon oneself the responsibility of child care, making its work a regular and substantial part of one’s working life’ (MT 17). With this brief announcement she signals her perception of the central moral dynamic of mothering: the noncontingent, but unenforceable, ‘adoption’ of obligations for the well-being of a child. With this relatively conventional, largely instrumental understanding of maternal care she sets about unpacking its intertwined emotional, cognitive and ethical significance through a consideration of the specific activities generated by its responsibilities.

Maternal practices are a response, she asserts, to three kinds of ‘demands’. Two of these issue from children themselves: the calls for preservation of their lives and the fostering of their growth. The third requirement is exacted by the socio-political group in which mothers are integrated: the demand that children be raised in a manner acceptable to the values of the group. To be a mother, according to Ruddick, is to be committed to meeting these constituents of maternal work through the activities of preservative love, nurture and training (MT 17).

Although she recognizes that the demands – and the practices these demands solicit – are historically and culturally specific, and that ‘conceptions of “maternal thinking” are as various as the practices of mothering from which they derive’ (MT 52), Ruddick maintains that there is sufficient commonality in the expectations of mothers to justify the universal relevance of her claims. And although she also says that she recognizes that her orientation is a product of her socialization in a tradition that affirms cross-cultural generalizations of needs and desires, her assertion that maternal practices are organized to meet ‘a demand intrinsic to the promise of birth’ stands steadfast against these disclaimers. Consequently, as she lays out the implications for mothers of their children’s requirements for ‘preservation’, ‘growth’ and ‘social acceptability’, Ruddick articulates the guiding conception of achievement under which the ‘struggle’ of mothering relationships occurs for all mothers.

Preservative love – the continual response to children’s demand for protection and preservation – is a passionate work of securing the safety of the extremely vulnerable child within a largely uncontrollable and dangerous environment (MT 65–81). For many mothers this activity begins with their recognition of the ‘dangers’ that they themselves present to their children. Sometimes this recognition may come from a perception of the intense dependency of their children on them. In this case a mother’s absence, sickness or death is seen as a threat to her child. Sometimes the perceived risk may stem from a mother’s sense of her own emotional, material and intellectual inadequacies. These dimensions of vulnerability require mothers to be attentive to their own well-being, as well as open to the possibilities of experiential learning, the capacity to modify and refine their skills through the accumulation of experiences of responding to their children.

The environment at large also presents extensive dangers to children, in view of their unfamiliarity with it and their inability to cope with theirsurvival needs.¹² Following Ruddick, mothers maintain the balance of control in the face of these perpetual risks through a characteristic protectiveness that Ruddick calls ‘holding’. She describes it, rather cryptically, as a relational stance to another that minimizes risks and reconciles differences rather than sharply accentuating them, and goes on to explain that ‘holding is a way of seeing with an eye toward maintaining the minimal harmony, material resources, and skills necessary for sustaining a child in safety’ (MT 78–9). The term ‘holding’ originates in psychology where it is used to describe the transitional zone between the early, ‘total’ identification of infants with their mothers and their separation in maturity. Accordingly it denotes a ‘space’ in which children may play, create and fantasize in the unobtrusive but reassuring presence of their mothers. The children’s own world is both validated and suffused with the mother’s protection. ‘Holding’ thus provides the child with a feeling of safety without domination or confinement, a sense of security that is open to possibility.¹³

Ruddick explains that ‘holding’ is bound up with the two enabling virtues of humility and cheerfulness, both of which draw on a profound sense of one’s limits and expectations in an uncontrollable world. Humility expresses the optimal mean between the extremes of abandonment of control and domination; cheerfulness expresses the mean between the denial of limits and passive submission. Identification of these virtues is, for Ruddick, the acknowledgement of the struggle that mothering entails. Humility and cheerfulness are but ideals – constantly under threat from the exhausting, thankless and uncertain nature of protecting vulnerable and unpredictable persons in a world that is beyond their mothers’ control. Mothering practices are therefore frequently marked by an intermixture of emotions like love, hate, fear, sorrow, impatience, resentment and despair, provoking the ambivalence that Jane Lazarre has claimed is ‘the only thing which seems . . . to be eternal and natural in motherhood’.¹⁴

Maternal care is constituted in multiple levels of vulnerability. Infants and children are vulnerable to their physical and social environments; mothers, too, are vulnerable to an unpredictable and uncontrollable world. In such contexts of uncertainty and lack of control, moral codes and principles may be seen as attempts to impose order and control over a world that outruns human limits. From this perspective, Ruddick’s virtues may appear to endorse ‘codes’ of submissiveness, receptivity and empathy, that some feminist theorists claim men impose on women’s unruliness. In her work Lesbian Ethics, Sara Hoagland, for example, reminds lesbians of the limiting and oppressive underside of these feminine ideals and directs them to the enabling possibilities of creative choice within conditions of uncertainty.¹⁵ While Ruddick’s cheerfulness and humility may be interpreted in this way, they are by no means necessarily or best understood as the destructive underside of masculine morality. We can see that she envisages them – like Hoagland’s ‘creative choice’ – as leading to the range of ethical possibilities that lie between the twin dangers of overweening control and unquestioning submission. And like Hoagland, she notes the practical difficulties and ambivalence they entail.

The key attitude that Ruddick associates with the second sphere of maternal activity, nurture of children’s growth, is a ‘welcoming response to change’ (MT 89). Her point is to underline the dynamic character of mothering relations. Thus, in attending to the specificity and minutiae of children’s needs, mothers appreciate that change and growth are built into those needs. ‘Rapid conversions, shifts of interests, new loves and sudden hates are part of childhood life, however unsettling they may be for a mother who may wish to count on yesterday’s friendship or passionate ambition’ (MT 89). As a result, mothers’ acceptance of these changes, and welcoming of them by means of their own willingness to change and develop themselves with and through their children’s shifts and turns, are crucial to maternal nurture. And, since ‘welcoming responsiveness to change’ involves uncertainty, once again it is evident that the ethical possibilities of caring are bound up with the delicate balancing of vulnerability and submission, abandonment and domination.

Ruddick explains that sensitivity to change entails an holistic appreciation of the separate personhood of the child making her or his own sense of the world, rather than consisting of piecemeal responses to specific changes as if they were episodic and fragmented. Such sensitivity involves receptiveness to children’s sudden changes as being coherently structured by a complex of ‘interdependent perceptions, feelings, and fantasies and by multiple, potentially unifying acts of responding and interpreting’ (MT 92). For although mothering relationships are constituted in and through the intense dependency of children, they are also premised on acknowledgement of children’s capacities to forge their own distinctive identities and to establish their own integrity with their own values.

The problem of recognizing and accepting the otherness of other persons is an important aspect of caring relations. Ruddick’s description of the cognitive dimensions of recognition and acceptance draws on the terms of concrete and contextual attentiveness made familiar by Carol Gilligan’s work in moral psychology. In particular, Ruddick sketches the contours of a style of thinking that is open-ended, that relishes complexity, tolerates ambiguity, and multiplies options, rather than pursuing stable and simplified formulations of the nature of situations and persons. The rapid changes, irregularity and unpredictability of children’s emotions and actions, these provide some of the most powerful and immediate evidence for the relevance of this cognitive ethos; the relational practice of responding ethically to children encourages and teaches it.

In an insightful passage, Ruddick suggests how this ethical attentiveness may be developed through a variety of conversational practices (MT 97–102). She points to practices in which mothers’ capacities for concrete ways of knowing are refined by articulating their maternal experiences, alternately through storytelling, gossip and focused conversations. Several theorists have discussed the various ways in which verbal communication can be a moral resource and we will see in Chapter 2 how it becomes a vital practice for ethical understanding and mutuality between friends. Storytelling and conversations offer the opportunity to elaborate observations, rehearse judgements, establish continuities and connections, and provoke innovative transformations.¹⁶ But Ruddick shows that in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Mothering
• Chapter 2: Friendship
• Chapter 3: Nursing
• Chapter 4: Citizenship
• Epilogue
• Notes