The Democratic Potential of Mothering

IN THIS ESSAY, I ADDRESS two kinds of dangers to democratic citizenship: those posed by introducing into politics problems and perspectives pertaining to mothering and those posed by failing to do so. The attempt to develop a feminist democratic theory has spawned a variety of arguments. Some of those arguments embrace the notion of participatory politics while rejecting the exclusion of household life from politics,' while others maintain that politics is about matters of general and shared concern and hence must transcend the perspectives of narrow group interest or care for the lives of particular loved ones.2 I focus on the debate within this literature between theorists who argue that mothers or women have a distinctive moral perspective that can transform public life3 and theorists who argue that feminist citizens must make explicitly political matters their first concern.4 Each side of the debate -the thinkers and the feminists -has something important to contribute to developing a democratic theory that encompasses the household. Maternal thinking is right to emphasize the activity of nurturing as a source for political values and judgment, and civic feminism rightly insists on the need to transform the interest, attachment, or insight of the private mother into claims that are politically negotiable. Yet so far, neither side has listened carefully or sympathetically enough to the other; hence each has missed something important about the other's argument to the detriment of all of our thinking about feminist notions of democratic citizenship. I begin by reviewing this debate over mothering and citizenship, first addressing the argument that women as mothers develop a style of thinking about ethical problems and responsibility for nurture which is politically valuable, then turning to the argument that maternal thinking leads neither to democratic nor to feminist consciousness. In the second half of the essay, I argue that there are two ways that mothering can draw women toward