Civic housekeeping: Jean Elshtain on mothering and other duties

Christian Century, May 17, 2003 by Wendy Murray Zoba

After polio, she says, Joan of Arc faded away. Or one might say Joan was reborn. Jean was forced to conceive of a different kind of battlefield with a new set of roles. Combating polio, she says, "either wipes you out or you become a little fierce. You hope you can use that to good purposes."

At 18 she married her high school sweetheart and soon bore three daughters. The first girl, Sheri, was born with mental retardation, which her husband could not accept. Jean left the marriage after five years, which scandalized her family. Her second husband, Errol Elshtain, whom she married in 1966, adopted the three girls and together they had a son of their own. They have since adopted grandson Bobby.

Her resolve to use her personal straggle to "good purposes" has been informed, in part, by one of her favorite writers, Albert Camus. "There's a line of his I use over and over again--that we're obliged not to impose our own inner ravages upon the world. We all have our places of exile and anger and repudiation. But it's our responsibility to hold these in check."

WHEN SHE WAS earning a Ph.D. in politics at Brandeis University, Elshtain was also a wife and mother. She was contending at once with the philosophy of Hegel and what to cook for supper while the baby fussed. "How do you keep these multiple goods alive in yourself and in the society at large?" she asked herself during this frenzied time. "I felt I had to find a way to be faithful to all [of the demands]. "Which is where she has parted company with some radical feminists.

"One of my objections to radical feminism is that I think you don't repudiate the family; you don't start attacking motherhood. Number one, you can't do without mothers, and number two, think of all the woman throughout history and the contributions they've made in that way and how brutal social life would be without that." She refers to mothering as an "animating ethos."

"Women had a powerful imperative to say to the men, 'Let's settle down,' wanting a safe abode for their children. That thereby helped to create the basis of civilization and culture as we came to call it," she says. "This determination to see that offspring survive is the basis of a lot of the developments of culture."

The so-called "powerlessness" of women developed as the agricultural way of life evolved into a more industrialized model wherein gender roles became more defined. "The men handled the outside stuff and there was a lot the women did domestically." She says that radical feminism has carried this sense of powerlessness to extremes, suggesting that women have "always been crushed and stymied in their aspirations, as if historically women didn't exercise any agency in the way in which they fill out the vocations available to them." This critique, she says, "in the name of feminism oddly diminishes the powerful role that women have played in history and culture."

Her model for applying the animating ethos of mothering to civic life is Addams (1860-1935), founder of Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago. Addams herself never married and had no children, though she became guardian of her sister's youngest child when her sister died of typhoid fever. Yet the spirit of Hull House was fueled by a sheltering, maternal impulse, expressed in care for one's neighbor.