Gilligan, Carol 1936-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carol Friedman Gilligan was born November 28, 1936, in New York City. Her book In a Different Voice ushered in an era of research and theory about gender differences that valued the voices of girls and women.

Gilligan grew up in New York City. She went on to do her undergraduate work at Swarthmore College, where she majored in English and history, graduating summa cum laude in 1958. She earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College in 1960 and a PhD in social psychology from Harvard in 1964. She began teaching at Harvard with the psychologist Erik Erikson in 1967 and continued teaching at Harvard’s School of Education, receiving tenure as a full professor in 1986. During her early years at the School of Education she co-taught a course with Lawrence Kohlberg, whom she considered a friend (although many biographies wrongly describe her as his student). As a teacher in the 1980s at the School of Education, she taught courses on the psychology of moral development and adolescence and was known for lectures integrating literature, mythology, biography, and history. In 1997 Gilligan was appointed to a newly endowed professorship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Patricia Albjerg Graham Chair in Gender Studies, Harvard University’s first position in gender studies. In 2002, shortly after the announcement of a 12.5 million dollar grant to the School of Education from Jane Fonda, who stated she was inspired by Carol Gilligan’s work, Gilligan joined the faculty of New York University as a full-time professor in the schools of education and law.

In In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982), Gilligan identified a kind of moral reasoning that was based on an ethic of care rather than an ethic of justice. Although the ethic of care has been identified as women’s moral voice, the “different voice” Gilligan describes is “characterized not by gender but theme. Its association with women is an empirical observation, and it is primarily through women’s voice that I trace its development” (p. 2). The voices of women and girls, she claimed, had been neglected by those who studied morality, such as Piaget and Freud. She pointed out first that these men and others based their theories of human development on a male model of separation and individuation, often studying, observing, or speaking only to boys and men and later describing as an afterthought how girls and women did not fit the norm. In this groundbreaking book, Gilligan criticized the work of Lawrence Kohlberg (whose theory was based on a study that included only adolescent boys), because women, in his six stages of moral development, seemed unable to advance beyond Stage 3, also known as the “good boy/nice girl stage.” Kohlberg’s research showed more men than women advancing to stages in which they preferred to use a morality that was based on contracts, individual rights, justice, and even what he called a universal morality; females were more likely to remain in adulthood in the so-named “conventional” morality stages. Through several studies that included interviews discussing Kohlberg’s moral dilemmas as well as what Gilligan called “real-life” dilemmas, she showed girls and women to be responding not only to issues of justice, but issues of care. Although the point was not elaborated in In a Different Voice, she later argued that women’s association with stage 3 was not structural, but a function of patriarchy. She then further developed the cultural/social side of her argument and the element of resistance so key to her work with girls. Over time Gilligan’s work has been inaccurately described as suggesting that women are more caring than men. Rather, she argues that women are more likely to make moral decisions based on issues of care, inclusion, and personal connection, rather than on a more abstract and distant notion of justice.

The methodological shortcomings in others’ works that Gilligan critiqued in In a Different Voice were the impetus for new research methods used and developed in Gilligan’s later work and in the work of her students. In this work she and those influenced by her continued to fault researchers for using a male perspective as a starting point. She also encouraged the increasing use of open-ended interviews focused on self in relation to a range of issues, an approach that had largely been dismissed as producing suspect “self-report” data. In addition, her work valued qualitative, thematic analysis. The “Listener’s Guide,” written with Lyn Mikel Brown, describes a voice-sensitive method attuned to a psyche in active dialogue with the sociopolitical realities of everyday life.

Following her publication of In a Different Voice, Gilligan herself continued to pursue qualitative research exploring the relational world of girls, resulting in Meeting at the Crossroads (1992), coauthored with Brown, and Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationship (1996), coauthored with students Jill McLean Taylor and Amy M. Sullivan. She has helped guide the work of former students, such as Janie Victoria Ward (The Skin We’re In, 2000), Dana Jack (Silencing the Self, 1991, and Behind the Mask, 1999), Deborah Tolman (Dilemmas of Desire, 2003), Niobe Way (Everyday Courage, 1998), and Lyn Mikel Brown (Raising Their Voices, 1998, and Girlfighting, 2005). Her work has also been influential in feminist discourse theory, law, medicine, and philosophy. Gilligan was a founder of the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, and of Strengthening Healthy Resistance and Courage in Girls, a prevention project that also was expanded to include boys and men as her interests shifted to examine the plight of boys in Western society.

Gilligan’s 2002 book The Birth of Pleasure summarizes themes of love and caring that were suggested in earlier work. Using the Cupid and Psyche myth as the quintessential Western love story, she discusses familiar themes of the objectification of women, the pitting of woman against woman in patriarchy, men’s fear of the intimacy they long for, and “dissociation”—or the process by which women learn to forget or cover over what they know to be true and by which men learn to replace feelings of vulnerability and tenderness with masks of masculinity.

In 1992 Gilligan, the recipient of numerous awards, was given the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Education. This is given to honor achievements in areas not recognized by the Nobel prizes. She was also named one of Time Magazine ’s twenty-five most influential people in 1996. In 1997 she received the Heinz Award for knowledge of the human condition and for her challenges to previously held assumptions in the field of human development.

SEE ALSO Kohlberg, Lawrence

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sharon Lamb

GILLIGAN, CAROL 1936-

Developmental psychologist

Are Women and Men Different?

In 1982 Harvard University psychologist Carol Gilligan published her book In a Different Voice and startled a country trying to understand male and female differences. In the early 1980s the prevailing approach to sex differences was to ignore them. Differences implied inequality. But Gilligan's ten years of research convinced her that men and women really were different. They differed in the way they thought, in their sense of values and morality, and in the way they connected with other people. According to Carol Gilligan, "The spirit in which I wrote the book was to raise questions." Her research questioned traditional psychological concepts of human development that had always been drawn on a male model.

Putting Girls and Women on the Map

Carol Gilligan was an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University where she taught adolescent and moral development. Forty-five years old at the time of the publication of her research, she was the wife of a psychiatrist and the mother of three sons. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard between the birth of her first and second sons, and spent years in what she called women's "kitchen world." As a graduate student in psychology, Gilligan noticed that most theories of human psychological development were based on studies of boys and men. She set out to develop a theory based on the experiences of girls and women, Gilligan "wanted to ask men to listen to women's voices—and to say to women that if men hadn't listened in the past, it wasn't simply a matter of being narrow-minded or biased. They simply didn't know what to do with these voices. They did not fit."

A Different Voice

In 1975 when she was listening to pregnant women considering abortion, Gilligan first heard "the different voice." After researching these "voices" of girls and women, she defined two orientations or systems of moral values. The highest moral value for women was not justice, as it was for men, but care. "Morality for a woman was being responsible to oneself and others; as opposed to doing one's duty, fulfilling one's obligations," she said. Men resolved questions of right or wrong by looking at a broad ruling. Women questioned what was the responsible thing to do, not what was the right thing to do. In the past, the responses of girls to stories of moral choice were often considered wrong. The connection between this past research and the self-effacement typical of girls from puberty on up also interested Gilligan. She concluded that something happened to girls when they were about twelve. The confident eleven-year-old who offered an opinion on a moral dilemma would hold out for her point of view, but the fifteen-year-old would yield. Gilligan suspected that the older girls began to realize that bringing in their own values would make trouble in a world where male values were considered the norm. So the girls started waiting and watching for other people to give them their cues as to what their values should be. For Gilligan, a crucial question for the future was: "How do we get females not to abandon what they know at eleven?"

Toward a New Understanding

Before Gilligan published her studies, researchers sometimes dropped women from their samples because the women" different responses complicated the research. The publication of her landmark work made it much harder for researchers to equate "human" with male or to see female experience as simply an aberration. Gilligan hoped she had pointed the way for other researchers to pick up her research where she had left off. She put women on the map of human development and hoped her ideas about the differences between the sexes would change the way men and women understood themselves. For Gilligan, to label the different voice a female voice was too limiting. "I want to call it a human voice," she said," both to emphasize for women that they're in touch with the human condition—this is a real contribution to human thought—and to get rid of the phrase, 'as a woman and as a person.' "

Sources:

Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982);

"Carol Gilligan: When Girls Talk, She Listens," NEA Today (September 1990): 9;

Amy Gross, "Thinking Like a Woman," Vogue (May 1982): 268+;

Lindsy Van Gelder, "Carol Gilligan: Leader for a Different Kind of Future," Ms. (January 1984): 37+.