Engaged care in the family and small organizations can and should be leveraged in order to develop extended care, which is a crucial element of social and political life. However, care in politics can also be dangerous in its partiality and its propensity to control. A critical engagement with the writings and activism of Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, contemporaries negotiating the relationship between women's familial roles and their social and political citizenship, reveals the ways in which care can be deployed to strengthen democratic commitments as well as the drawbacks of care in politics.
