In the midst of current debates about health-care reform, one is reminded how difficult it is in the United States to make persuasive arguments about the responsibility of governments to care for their citizens. If Eileen McDonagh is correct, such arguments fall on deaf ears in the United States because our social and political values are grounded in the rejection of a hereditary monarchy—one which had “fused the family with the state” (p. 144)—in favor of a “motherless state” defined by inadequate welfare policies and the lack of gender representation in politics. McDonagh's thesis is that because the United States is not a caregiving state, women are excluded from the “natural pool” of political leaders. Her book addresses an age-old question: Why “in the world's oldest contemporary democracy … where equality is crucial to our national self-image” (p. 1) do so few women hold national political office? She asserts that in comparison to other liberal democracies “in terms of women's political representation, the United States is a laggard” (p. 2)—no argument here—and explains this in terms of distinctive features of American political development.

This laggard status is a conundrum, since at the beginning, the United States represented a heretofore untested form of democracy, establishing new systems of representation and codifying new sets of (negative) freedoms. The United States seemed to promise a new kind of freedom. Yet McDonagh argues, as do other feminist theorists, that negative freedoms just were not enough. But in contrast to scholars such as Carole Pateman, who see liberal democracy broadly as the fundamental problem, McDonagh attributes the failure of the American state to incorporate a sufficiently robust set of “positive freedoms” to its distinctive “motherlessness.” She argues that the “laggard status of America … stems from a failure to combine public policies based on individualism with those representing social or biological maternalism, in contrast to most comparable democracies” (p. 26). There probably will be little argument with her claim, based on statistical analysis using data drawn from the World Values Surveys, that positive public attitudes about women's fitness to serve as political leaders are highly correlated with societies where there are gender quotas for political representation, or that countries with high state levels of welfare services are also more likely to accept a role for women in public office.

Where McDonagh might find argument is with her thesis that the problem stems from gender-neutral public policies that fail to incorporate women's group difference from men—their ability to have children and their connection to caring. Her argument presumes that so long as women's maternal social and biological traits are ignored by the state, the public cannot see how women can be fit to be leaders within the state, since the perception of women is that they are mothers and caretakers. So what is the answer? She suggests the hybrid state, which incorporates both individualist and maternalist values. And she argues that since these maternal values are women's distinct contribution—at least that in the eyes of the broader public—they ought to be recognized in the laws and policies of the state.

It is at this point in the argument that some feminists might pull back and say: So all of our struggles over the last several decades have been merely to gain public recognition as mothers? To be fair, this is not quite McDonagh's argument. But I must admit to unease, for she is doing more than simply furthering compelling arguments developed by theorists such as Joan Tronto and Martha Nussbaum, who have focused on the ways that human societies must be restructured so that “care is not a private good but a broad and public value” (Tronto, “The Value of Care,” http://bostonreview.net/BR27.1/tronto.html, accessed November 16, 2009). McDonagh is instead suggesting that care must be incorporated into public policy as something perceived as essentially female, because it is maternal. In so doing, the public will see that there is indeed a role women can play in national political life, since national political life is about caring, not just about making war. Astonishingly, she thus finds a way to take traditional conceptions of women's biological and gender roles and turn them into a strategy for inclusion.

Even more provocatively, in developing this argument the author seeks to resurrect hereditary monarchies from the dustbin of history. In analyzing the countries where women's political representation is greater, and in seeking historical roots for the inclusion of maternal values, McDonagh recognizes that monarchies fuse kinship and politics, and that indeed in monarchies, women can be selected to serve as leaders because of their hereditary and biological relationships. It is an interesting and bold approach, especially since we tend to think of monarchies (if we think of them at all) as symbols of patriarchal authority. Her point is several-fold: that monarchies, especially in modern democracies, are symbols of the caring (if paternalistic) state; that women play a particular maternal role in hereditary monarchies and thus monarchies are “utterly dependent on women's biological reproductive labor capacities for their political viability” (p. 45); and that “monarchies teach the public about the political meaning of maternal traits attributed to women” (p. 46). But I am not sure how helpful it is to know that there is a positive correlation between constitutional monarchies and women in leadership roles. After all, we will not be establishing a monarchy anytime soon in the United States. Admittedly McDonagh uses the monarchy to remind us of how the fusion of family with state, which is the hallmark of monarchies, enabled the public acceptance of a caregiving state, and so it serves as a heuristic for her argument. I remain unconvinced, however, that monarchies can be a model for maternal policies, especially given the masculine preference that is practiced in hereditary systems.

McDonagh's data analysis is persuasive, and it is refreshing to read a text that takes seriously feminist theorizing, analytical research on gender representation, and gender policy analysis. However, while I agree that the three distinct policies through which a state can take on these “maternal” characteristics—welfare policies, gender quotas, and hereditary monarchies—can indeed help to increase the representation of women, it does not take us very far to argue that (for instance) gender quotas are a sign that a state is maternalist. After all, gender quota rules have been adopted only recently as political parties and institutions responded to feminist demands for gender representation, rather than as a response to maternalist arguments. It goes without saying that gender quotas (if implemented) will of necessity increase the number of women within legislatures. That correlation does not tell us much, though, about the adoption of maternalist values. Furthermore, McDonagh's foundational hypothesis—that perceptions about women being fit for public office are dependent on the public associating the state with essentialist views about women's maternal nature—also does not take us very far. For there will be little change in the state, or in society, unless the mothers filling our congressional halls themselves have values that move beyond the limitations of the reproductive differences between women and men. Sarah Palin, for example, contends that “there's no better training ground for politics than motherhood” (Michiko Kakutani, “Memoir as Payback,” New York Times, November 16, 2009). But I think we want more than that.

What does McDonagh mean by maternal? Although she intends maternal to be a substitute for gender and sex, to represent “social and biological reproductive labor, the care and generation of human beings respectively” (p. 18), I fear that the rhetoric gets in the way of an otherwise compelling argument about the need for a state that anticipates and incorporates both sameness and difference, both individual needs and collective care. In an appendix, she anticipates the objections of feminist readers who are likely to have a hard time swallowing her book's maternalist rhetoric. She does a superb job of reframing her argument within feminist theory, thus reassuring such readers. I just wish that Appendix I: “Concerning Materialism” had been incorporated directly into the book as chapter 2, for then her provocative argument would have been better contextualized, thus calming the disquiet that the rhetoric of her argument raises. Indeed, why maternalism? Since the hybrid state incorporates the values that are essential to a society that would select both female and male leaders, I want to plead that we get away from this talk about the limits of the motherless state and the need for the state to be more motherly. Yet, because public perceptions of gender roles are so slow to change, such talk cannot be so quickly dispensed with. To this extent, it is to McDonagh's credit that she forces us, in spite of our discomfort, to reassess the importance to women and the state of the maternal, and to insist that the state recognize the continuing salience of women's biological and social reproductive roles.