This chapter takes a critical look at maternally based arguments for peace. Early arguments made by the Women's Peace Party (WPP), ground women's opposition to the First World War in feminine morality and the virtues associated with Victorian motherhood. Sara Ruddick's work advances these claims and argues that maternal work/thinking provides a feminist political perspective from which to criticize military thinking.

In this chapter, I aim to show how important addressing racism and classism is to our construction of pacifist theory in practice. To make this point I focus on Ruddick's use of birthing labor and female embodiment as epistemic sources for a maternal pacifism. Ruddick claims that "histories of the flesh," exemplified by women's birthing labor and caregiving can serve as useful epistemic resources for an anti-militarist feminist peace politics. I criticize Ruddick's description of the connection between birthing labor and maternal practice, on the one hand, and pacifism, on the other. Ruddick's description of birthing labor does not address the painful, manipulated experience of labor that women of color often have in this country. (e.g. Native American women have often had their children taken away from them at birth and put up for adoption, Black are more likely to be talked into c-sections, and Latinas are commonly forced to sign sterilization consent forms (in English) when they are in labor.)

In addition, I argue that Ruddick's description of maternal practice as nonviolent simply ignores the violence to which many mothers resort in order to protect their children from real or imagined threats from people of dominant races, classes, and nations. An adequate and honest understanding of the foundations of maternal pacifism can only follow from the construction of an inclusive standpoint.