Carol Gilligan

Works

• 1982In a Different Voice

  Interviews, among them with women deciding about abortion, reveal a moral reasoning of care and responsibility that the stage models of development ranked as immature.

Position

Kohlberg had built his six stages of moral development on interviews with boys; when women were tested, many were scored at stage three, where morality means meeting others’ expectations and caring for them. Gilligan asked whether the scale was wrong rather than the women. In interviews with students, with women deciding whether to have an abortion and with others, she heard two ways of framing moral problems: an ethic of justice, which asks about rights and impartial rules, and an ethic of care, which asks how to respond to the needs of particular others without abandoning oneself or anyone else. Freud, Piaget and Kohlberg had treated the second as a deficit; Gilligan argued that it was a “different voice” that psychology had failed to hear. She stressed that this voice was defined by its theme, not by sex, but her observation that it was heard mainly from women made the book a classic of difference feminism and of care ethics. Critics raised several objections. Lawrence Walker’s review of studies (1984) and a meta-analysis by Sara Jaffee and Janet Hyde (2000) found only small differences between men and women in moral reasoning. Christina Hoff Sommers criticised her samples and methods. Feminist critics feared that praising care would confirm the traditional role of women. In later work Gilligan described patriarchy as a system that forces boys and girls to give up parts of their voice, and care as a human, not a feminine, ethic.

Life & context

Carol Gilligan was born in New York City in 1936. She studied English literature at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1958, clinical psychology at Radcliffe College and social psychology at Harvard, where she took her doctorate in 1964. In the late 1960s she taught with Erik Erikson at Harvard and then worked with Lawrence Kohlberg, whose stage theory of moral development dominated the field. In a Different Voice (1982) made her known far beyond psychology. At the Harvard Graduate School of Education she led research on the development of girls and in 1997 became the first professor of gender studies at Harvard. She was Pitt Professor at Cambridge from 1992 to 1994 and moved to New York University in 2002. Besides research she has written a novel, Kyra (2008), and, with her son Jonathan, a stage adaptation of The Scarlet Letter.

Further main works

• Meeting at the Crossroads (with Lyn Mikel Brown, 1992)
• The Birth of Pleasure (2002)
• Joining the Resistance (2011)
• Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (with Naomi Snider, 2018)
• In a Human Voice (2023)