ABSTRACT
Feminist ideas have been at the center of an emerging debate about the nature of democratic politics. Two strands of feminist writing illuminate the debate on deliberative democracy. One strand, which celebrates women's greater nurturance, modifies and enriches the deliberative framework by providing images and models of practice from women's experience. Another strand, which focuses on male oppression, warns against deliberation serving as a mask for domination. The quality of deliberation makes or breaks a democracy. Good deliberation produces, along with good solutions, the emotional and intellectual resources to accept hard decisions. For non-separatist strands in feminist thought, the problem became how to integrate the nurturance, listening, and emotional sensitivity of superior culture into the politics that women had inherited from men. Some feminists have reacted to the prevailing definition of politics as only power, and power as only domination, by elaborating what Nancy Hartsock calls "the feminist theory of power."
