May 24: A Different Voice

Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development was published on this date in 1982. The book asserted that women’s moral and psychological sensibilities are shaped by women’s oppression and are also concretely different from men’s. Whereas men tend to think in terms of rules, hierarchy, justice, and individuation, women tend to think in terms of relationships, attachment, and communication, Gilligan argued. Her work exposed the biases of psychological studies based primarily or exclusively on interviews with males, and reframed “qualities regarded as women’s weaknesses and show(ed) them to be human strengths,” according to reviewer Amy Gross. Carol Gilligan has spent the bulk of her academic career at the Harvard School of Education, where she became the first professor of gender studies in 1997.

“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.” —Carol Gilligan