Everything about women is in perpetual crisis.

Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows.

Both love and democracy depend on voice -- having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard.

My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. Because these languages share an overlapping moral vocabulary, they contain a propensity for systematic mistranslation.

Trust grows when babies and mothers establish that they can find each other again after the inevitable moments of losing touch. It is not the goodness of the mother or the relationship per se that is the basis for trust; it is the ability of mother and baby together to repair the breaks in their relationship that builds a safe house for love.

While men represent powerful activity as assertion and aggression, women in contrast portray acts of nurturance as acts of strength.

In the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection.