Sara Ruddick's Theory of Maternal Thinking Applied To Traditional Irish Mothering

Abstract

This paper uses Sara Ruddick's theory of maternal thinking to explain patterns of Irish mothering that developed in Ireland following the Great Famine of 1845–1852. Ruddick's central thesis, that maternal thinking develops strategies for preserving the life of the child, fostering the child's growth, and shaping an acceptable child, is applied to the intersecting influences of famine memory, religion, education, and emigration in post-famine Ireland. The strict, moralistic, and highly inhibiting features of Irish culture that dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are traceable to patterns of mothering that developed after the famine. While Irish mothers are often blamed for instilling values that stressed sexual repression and guilt, other cultural factors influenced maternal thinking. Mothers did foster highly repressive moral values that encouraged permanent celibacy and delayed marriage. This paper examines the larger cultural features that derived from political oppression and the famine as they imprinted these values.

Keywords

Irish mothers Sara Ruddick maternal thinking Irish culture Irish famine

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References

Sara Ruddick , Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).

Ibid., 160-84.

Carol Gilligan , In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1984).

Ruddick , Maternal Thinking, 1989; Sara Ruddick, 1983. "Maternal Thinking," in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Treblicot (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld , 1983), 213-30.

See Nancy Scheper-Hughes , Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

Cecil Woodham-Smith , The Great Hunger (New York: Old Town, 1962), 14-20.

Ibid., 27.

See K.H. Connell , The Population of Ireland 1750-1845 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950); L.M. Cullen , "Population Growth and Diet, 1600-1850," in Irish Population, Economy, and Society: Essays in Honour of the Late K. H. Connell, eds. J. M. Goldstrom and L.A. Clarkson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 89-112.

See K.H. Connell , Irish Peasant Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).

10.

See Hasia R. Diner , Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1983), 1-29.

11.

Janet Nolan , "The Great Famine and Women's Emigration from Ireland," in The Hungry Stream: Essays on Emigration and Famine , ed. E. Margaret Crawford ( Belfast: Institute for Irish Studies, 1997), 61-70.

12.

Diner , Erin's Daughters in America, 12-18; Nolan "The Great Famine and Women's Emigration from Ireland," 64.

13.

See Woodham-Smith , The Great Hunger, 38-77.

14.

Ibid., 69-70, 75-77.

15.

Tom Inglis , Moral Monopoly: The Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland , 2nd ed. (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998.), 165; Diner , Erin's Daughters in America, 32.

16.

Robert E. Kennedy , Jr.The Irish: Emigration, Marriage, and Fertility ( Berkeley: University of California, 1973), 22.

17.

Inglis , Moral Monopoly , 105.

18.

Woodham-Smith , The Great Hunger, 341.

19.

Inglis , Moral Monopoly , 107-11.

20.

Ibid., 179.

21.

Ibid., 192-96.

22.

R.B. McDowell , "Ireland on the Eve of the Famine" in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845-52, eds. R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1975), 3-88.

23.

Nolan "The Great Famine and Women's Emigration from Ireland," 64; Kennedy , The Irish, 15.

24.

Inglis , Moral Monopoly , 196-99.

25.

Ibid., 188.

26.

See Inglis , Moral Monopoly; Nolan , "The Great Famine and Women's Emigration from Ireland"; Kennedy, Jr, The Irish.

27.

Nolan , " The Great Famine and Women's Emigration from Ireland," 65; Padraic Colum , My Irish Year (New York : James Pott, 1968), 97-112; Patrick B. Noonan , "Why Few Irish Marry," in The Vanishing Irish: The Enigma of the Modern World, ed. John O'Brien ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), 42-49.

28.

Scheper-Hughes , Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, 95-130.

29.

See Scheper-Hughes , Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics.

30.

Inglis , Moral Monopoly , 187.

31.

Nolan , " The Great Famine and Women's Emigration from Ireland," 64.

32.

Inglis , Moral Monopoly , 189.

33.

Ruddick , 1983, "Maternal Thinking."

34.

Inglis , Moral Monopoly , 196.

35.

Scheper-Hughes , Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, 158-59.

36.

Ibid, 158; Inglis , Moral Monopoly , 198.

37.

Inglis , Moral Monopoly , 196.

38.

Scheper-Hughes , Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, 148-49.

39.

Woodham-Smith , The Great Hunger, 25.

40.

Scheper-Hughes , Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, 149.

41.

Ibid., 112-13.