ABSTRACT
Like psychoanalytic feminists, care-focused feminists are interested in the differences that distinguish the female from the male psyche. According to care-focused feminists, boys and girls grow up into men and women with gender-specific values and virtues that serve to empower men and disempower women in a patriarchal society. In her groundbreaking book In a Different Voice, moral psychologist Carol Gilligan noted that men's emphasis on separation and autonomy leads them to develop a style of moral reasoning that focuses on justice, fairness, and rights. Similarly to Gilligan, Nel Noddings observed that traditional ethics has favored theoretical as opposed to practical modes of reasoning and 'masculine' as opposed to 'feminine' values. A number of critics faulted Gilligan's methodology. Sarah Lucia Hoagland disputed Noddings's claim that breaking a relationship almost always results in some type of 'ethical diminishment'. The claim that something like the mother-child relationship is an inappropriate paradigm for ethical relationships is the most serious challenge to maternal ethics.
