Comment: Response to Wilder’s “Mother/Nature,” and Ruddick’s “Maternal Thinking”

Abstract

I very much welcome Professor Wilder’s debunking of Rossi’s theses and arguments and I wholeheartedly share his rejection of that sort of biological determinism and his recognition of the unnaturalness of all human behavior. That last is, I think, an essential first step toward our assuming responsibility for how things are. However, I am not as comfortable as he seems to be with the liberal anyone-can-parent line of thought. What gives me pause about that may be some of the same experience and observations that make the Rossi sort of view so plausible to so many people. That is, regardless of my clear knowledge that an ability to acquire facility in the home kitchen or with infant care is not biologically determined, and also my knowledge that ability to become competent in the maintenance of the common automobile is not biologically determined either, I see many such propensities and abilities as being hardly less difficult to acquire or to lose as a gendered adult than if they had been biologically determined. In other words, the tracking into gender-correlated competencies creates a “second-nature”—each individual seems to take to some activities and practices naturally. It feels natural, one is “a natural” as a mother or as a businessman; it seems natural to all those around, as well. And, learned and human-created though it may be, it is not therefore easy to undo.