Peta Bowden develops the image of caring as a skill that is linked to feminist notions of intricate skill and intelligent practice. She recognises that the practice outruns the theories that attempt to analyse the subject. This work investigates four main caring practices: mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship examining the relationship between theory and practice in feminist ethics. Using a Wittgensteinian approach to understanding, her thesis extends and challenges recent feminist discussions of the ethic of care as a gender-sensitive corrective to traditional moral theory. It elaborates a more complex understanding of the diversity and ambiguity of the ethical possibilities of caring than has been presented in earlier analyses. A brief introduction to the contemporary debate is followed by accounts of six different examples of caring practices, viz: caring attention, taking care of oneself, mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship. The aim of this study is to show that caring constitutes an intricate labyrinth of ethical possibilities, the understanding of which involves approaching it from numerous directions. Through concern for the similarities and differences between these examples, their insights and their oversights, the thesis displays the limitations of theories which presume a unified, non-contexted ethic of care. At the same time the detailed descriptions of caring practices affirm the ethical significance of a range of activities that are frequently overlooked in conventional accounts of ethics.