Published in 1977
349 pages
Sara Ruddick was a feminist philosopher and the author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Ruddick earned a B.A. at Vassar College in 1957 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1964. She taught philosophy and women’s studies at the New School of Social Research for forty years. She was awarded the Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the Year Award by the Society for Women in Philosophy in 2002. A panel celebrating her work was held at the American Philosophical Association meeting in San Diego in 2012.[4] She participated in the oral history project, Feminist Philosophers: In Their Own Words, which provides interviews with important feminist philosophers involved in the Women’s Movement during the 1960s and 1970s.
What is this book about?
A collection of essays by professional women describing the social and psychological difficulties
helpful review from elstaffe on goodreads:
Reading this 1970s-written book in 2021, it seems almost redundant to say that this was an interesting historical document. But that’s what I primarily came away with from reading this—the essays in this book captured a very specific time for a very specific subset of women. It was a little weird reading some of these authors and thinking “oh, I know what’s to come in your future, and it’s not necessarily all great opinions and choices,” but then again, I’m sure that would be the case with any collection of essays of women writing about work now.
I know it’s not fair to judge a book published almost 45 years ago by what I want now, which is a similar book with more different voices, and I know the editors set out in the foreword that in some ways, the writers represented in this book are a particularly academic and narrow slice of the world. But, well. That’s part of what really makes this feel of a different time to me—not just the different and more overtly misogynist world the writers had to navigate, but which voices were chosen to talk about it.
