Noddings sets out to challenge the field of political theory by reversing the order of subjects. Instead of starting with the ideal state that requires a particular type of home, she proposes to start with a vision of the ideal home that can be used as the basis for creating a caring state. She posits a developmental process that is facilitated by ideal homes. Children who are cared for will learn how to care for others and to care about others. The last concern is what ties care to a just society. The move from private caring to public or socialized caring is the crucial point of the argument. To a large extent, Noddings simply assumes that ideal privatized caring will produce adults who will embrace her liberal policy agenda. For empirical grounding, she points to the gender gap in public opinion and posits that women are more liberal because they care for bodies. Of course, there is a large number of women who are full-time caregivers but who are not liberal. Producing caring human beings is certainly a worthwhile goal, but Noddings does not provide adequate evidence to show that caring human beings care about other people's children or about the well-being of other classes and ethnic groups.

In her model of the ideal home, Noddings allows for a variety of family formations. She also allows for a certain amount of cultural diversity. Yet her biases come through as she builds into her notion of the ideal home a potential contradiction. An ideal home provides more than care for the children; it prepares them for success in a liberal-democratic society. This standard allows her to evaluate negatively the effectiveness of different cultural practices of providing care. As Noddings argues, “in well-intentioned efforts to respect all cultures, our society often deprives children (and their families) of the knowledge they need to succeed in such societies” (p. 123). Also by focusing solely on care in the home, Noddings misses an opportunity to find important caring practices in other contexts. Jane Addams, someone Noddings praises for her striving to create a new cultural synthesis, argued in Democracy and Social Ethics(1902) that working-class immigrant communities had a lot to teach the middle-class charity worker about caring relations. Because training for success trumps caring relations, Noddings needs to explain how her ethic of care challenges in practice, not just theoretically, individualistic, nonrelational notions of being in the world.

As she envisions taking the home into the state, Noddings acknowledges that she accepts maternal coercion as a model for the state. As she declares, “in all human interactions today, from parenting to those involving the federal government, we suffer more from lack of care than from coercion” (p. 44). This theme marks one of her breaks with the classical liberal emphasis on individual rights. She is bothered by the right of the homeless person to sleep outdoors. She believes that coercion based on attentive love is qualitatively different from an unacceptable form of public “paternalism,” because “[i]t is open to negotiation, it pays attention to expressed needs even as it presses for inferred needs, and it weighs harms and goods and stands ready to back off if harms threaten to overwhelm goods” (p. 135). To illustrate further how private caring relations should be models for public life, Noddings argues against using a notion of justice to frame public care policies. For her, justice should come out of care and not the other way around.

Because the payoff of the book comes in making the case that caring humans would produce caring policies, I find it remarkable that she does not engage with the theme of the crucial role of women's agency outside the home. She separates the emancipation of women from the project of creating a political ethic of care. As she explains, “I have suggested here that women's concerns go well beyond interests in their own advancement in public life” (p. 301). Apparently, women's equality in public life is a selfish endeavor, while using women's traditions of creating caring homes is a social purpose. When she calls on us to adapt women's caring skills to public life, Noddings ignores the caring needs of those women who might actually choose to put her political project into practice. By taking this route, Noddings puts aside the difficult problem of how to create a democratic politics of care that would place the nurturing of human life at the center.

MacKay takes, as her central problem, how to adapt the ethic of care to the problem of how to get more women into elected office. She develops this theme by interconnecting scholarship on women and politics, ethic of care theory, and interviews of 53 elected women councillors in local government. Her context is Scotland in the mid-1990s, when it was open to feminist discourses because it was engaged in a democratization process that included devolution and the creation of a Scottish Parliament. Her distinct contribution is to show how a political ethic of care that draws on difference feminism is an essential complement to the European feminist emphasis on quotas or parity to achieve equal representation.

MacKay begins her analysis of how to get more women into elected office by counterposing the use of quotas, as part of a justice approach, to the development of a political ethic of care that could radically reshape the practice of politics. To make her case, she points to the precarious legal status of positive action taken by political parties in Scotland to achieve equal representation by gender in the first Parliament. She notes that within a liberaldemocratic context, different versions of quotas are always suspect and lack legitimacy. Even if they produce parity, she argues, the presence of women in representative institutions is not sufficient if the entire way of doing politics is not woman or family friendly.

MacKay suggests ways that a political ethic of care could be adapted to representative institutions. Her vision gains credibility because she can point to specific ways in which the characteristics of the new Scottish institutions can be understood in the political vocabulary of care. She finds “similarities between the vision of the political ethics of care with its recognition of diversity and interdependence and its dimensions of attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness; and the Scottish Parliament's attempt to move beyond ‘power politics’ towards a problem-solving approach” (p. 215).

To use the ethic of care to redesign politics, MacKay points to a number of promising directions. The caregiving responsibilities of women politicians would have to be addressed. To take these needs seriously, care would have to be revalued. As one Scottish councillor puts it, “Until care work is equally valued you won’t get change in the way that politics is organized” (p. 182). To provoke a public discussion about the public and private politics of care, MacKay advocates incorporating categories such as “care demanders” and “privileged irresponsibility” into the political vocabulary that is used to characterize politicians.

MacKay's defense of difference feminism takes on a practical significance because of its grounding in women's activism in the midst of a democratization process that includes the aim of equal representation of women. To achieve this aim, she shows that the possibility of a more caring social policy rests not on ignoring the agency of women in public life but on addressing the caring requirements and capabilities of women who choose to go into electoral politics. The entrance of women in equal numbers to men clearly brings into politics the practical problem of how to combine a genuine democracy with the nurturing of human lives.