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.
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."
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""
Before Gilligan published her studies, researchers sometimes dropped women from their samples because the women's 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 continue her research. 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.'"
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