Grieving US Mothers and the Political Representations of Protest during the Iraq War and Beyond

Abstract

The figure of the grieving mother has been intrinsic to the long history of war. That history has been particularly gendered inflected, deriving from what some feminist analysts see as the divisions between masculinity, militarism, and motherhood. According to Sara Ruddick, “Mothering begins in birth and promises life; military thinking justifies organized deliberate deaths. A mother preserves the bodies, nurtures the psychic growth, and disciplines the conscience of children she cares for; the military deliberately endangers the same body, mind, and conscience in the name of victory and abstract causes. Mothers protect children who are at risk; the military risks the children mothers protect.”¹ While the somewhat essentialist constructions of motherhood expressed by Ruddick suggest a natural opposition to militarism, in fact mothers have often been enablers of patriotic and patriarchal militarism. Even in suffering the loss of a child during war, that grief has been buried in private rituals of implied consent.