The strongest and most popular uniting theme in women's/feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in their roles as mothers. Sara Ruddick's book Maternal Thinking:Toward a Politics of Peace (1989) is best thought of as a developmental narrative of her philosophical thinking about maternal practice and how it might plausibly ground a peace politics. My analysis looks first at the relationship between two basic components of Ruddick's argument: her "practicalist conception of truth" and her use of feminist standpoint theory. I argue that neither component can adequately ground a feminist maternal peace politics without first answering the question of who speaks for mothers. The "nearly universal" activities that characterize Ruddick's account of maternal practice do not allow her to easily raise questions that emerge from differences among mothers.

To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Ruddick's own account of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of African American women's "motherwork." I conclude that if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships mothers have to violence and/or military institutions -- in virtue of their class, race and sex--then, the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the connections between maternal work/thinking and peace.