Feminist Ethics – From Mothers to Global Citizens

Michelle Mattson (Rhodes College) [BIO]

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ABSTRACT:

Early articulations of feminist ethics (Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick) attempted to concretize human relationships and foreground specific interpersonal interactions rather than continuing to pursue the abstraction of autonomous individuals implicated in each other’s lives only through voluntarily entered contractual bonds. Indeed, early feminist ethics, most often referred to as care ethics, centered on the mother/child or teacher/student dyad. Of course, no intellectual models remain unchallenged, and other feminist ethicists quickly pinpointed the limitations to this model and sought to expand it through explorations of friendship (Hoagland and Friedmann), politics and care (Joan Tronto), and citizenship and the ethics of care (Sevenhuijsen and Bowden). Recent work with care ethics has also attempted to discuss how care conceptually can be applied to issues of international responsibilities (see e.g., Fiona Robinson, Globalizing Care). This paper paints in broad strokes the way that feminist ethics has developed, but it does so also by juxtapositioning it with examples from post-war German women’s writing that resonates, but also eerily anticipates in the late seventies and early eighties the turns feminist ethics would take in the nineties. Specifically, I will look at how personal relationships of care in the aftermath of World War II led certain German authors (Christa Wolf, Grete Weil, and Ingeborg Drewitz) to question precisely both the constraints that caring relationships put on us as individuals, but also how they urge us to reconsider our responsibilities toward less immediate social communities. Their voices prefigure and participate in the discussion arising from the international women’s movement in exciting ways. Through narrative exploration of specific dilemmas, they locate the weaknesses that scholars later saw in care ethics. Thus both the fictional narratives and the scholarly discourse offer us tools to explore the echoes that abound in the discursive and interpersonal spaces women and feminists have occupied over the last forty-some years as well as how these echoes motivate us to move forward.