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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Winner of the 2025 Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy
Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice – the "little book that started a revolution" – brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time.
Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the "different voice" (of care ethics), although initially heard as a "feminine" voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story.
With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people's experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Quote
Introduction
Notes
1 Women’s Voices and Women’s Silences
1. Radical Listening
2. The lens of resistance and accommodation
3. The tale of the emperor’s new clothes
Notes
2 Why Nobody Talks about the Abortion Decisions
Notes
3 Enter Eve
Notes
4 Moral Injury
1. Betrayal of What’s Right
2. A triptych of initiation
3. The Love Laws
Notes
5 In a Different Voice: Act II
1. Paul Thomas Anderson: Phantom Thread
2. Paul Schrader: First Reformed
3. Spike Lee: BlacKkKlansman
Notes
Epilogue: The Ethic of Care
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Quote
Introduction
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Dedication
In memory of my mother, Mabel Caminez Friedman, who taught me to listen for the voice under the conversation.
In a Human Voice
Carol Gilligan
polity
Copyright © Carol Gilligan 2023
The right of Carol Gilligan to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5680-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022951310
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
The immediate occasion for this book is the 40th anniversary of In a Different Voice and the 45th of the initial essay “In a Different Voice,” published by the Harvard Educational Review in 1977. The deeper provocation was the coalescing of the insight that led me to change my title.
I had been coming to this insight over a number of years, prompted by new research and changes in the social/political climate. What surprised me was how long it had taken me to see what, in retrospect, seems obvious: the voice of care ethics is a human voice and the gendering of a human voice as “feminine” is a problem. In coming to this clarity, I often had the sense of trying to make my way through a thicket. Hearing the “different voice” as a human voice meant clearing away a series of impediments that stood in the way of seeing that the gender binary – the construction of human capabilities as either “masculine” or “feminine” – is not only a distortion of reality, but a cornerstone of patriarchy. This book takes its impetus from all that follows from, and is clarified by, this realization.
In laying out the path I followed in coming to this more intricate joining of the psychological with the political, I have brought new writing together with recent works that became stepping stones along the way. I wrote the first half of this book, Chapters 1 and 2, in the winter of 2021–22 and most of the introduction the following summer. None of this writing has previously been published. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 appeared in somewhat different forms in 2020, 2014, and 2019 – bringing new material (biblical Eve, the concept of moral injury, three films written and directed by men working in the mainstream) to bear on my thinking about silence and voice, initiation and resistance, gender and development, patriarchy and democracy.
The opening paragraph of the Introduction dates back further, to the beginning of the 1990s when I wrote about my experience of listening to Anita Hill. That moment in time remains fixed in my memory because it brought home the difference between having a voice and being heard. Nowadays I find myself skeptical when I hear people speak of finding their voice as though this in itself will solve the myriad problems, both psychological and political, that follow in the wake of discovering that one’s experience cannot be heard, or will not be listened to and taken seriously. I recall being on a train in Japan, going from Kyoto to Tokyo. A graduate student had kindly offered to accompany me so I would not get lost in the Tokyo railway station. She was asking me about voice, about losing one’s voice, and when I said that nobody loses their voice, her face brightened. Would I write this in her notebook? she asked, handing me the book. “Nobody loses their voice,” I repeated as I inscribed the words on a blank page; people may silence their voice, I said, but it is always for a reason.
My deepest thanks to John Thompson, who embraced the idea of this book and brought his intelligence to bear in editing that was truly a gift. I am grateful to the three readers for Polity whose comments and suggestions I found exceptionally helpful. I owe an immense debt of gratitude for years of conversation to David Richards and to Niobe Way. To Naomi Snider, special thanks. To Judy Chu, Randy Testa, Walla Elshekh, Xanthia Hargreaves, Rachel Marandett, Amelia Spittal, and Briana Thomas. And to those writers who have been the best of friends – Jorie Graham, Rachel Kadish, Daphne Merkin, and Honor Moore. To Sarah Chalfant for her discerning ear and eye, and her wise suggestions. To Carol Brandt for the conversation in the coffee shop in Abu Dhabi. To Tina Packer, always. And to Jim, for listening, and then listening again.
The common humanity of people … is the only real protector of human rights.
Jan Karski
Introduction
In the Fall of 1991, the house across the street from mine was being painted, and the painters brought their radio to work each day, placing it alongside them on the scaffold. At the time, the United States Senate Judiciary Committee, acting under pressure, had called Professor Anita Hill to testify about the nomination of Clarence Thomas for Supreme Court Justice. The radio was turned up loud, and Anita Hill’s voice was riveting. The calm, steady sound of her speaking flowed down the street like a river. And then her voice was filtered through the responses of the senators. I remember the two-step process of listening to Anita Hill – hearing her, and then hearing her not being heard.
At the time I began writing In a Different Voice, women’s voices were conspicuously missing from the psychology I was teaching. Or rather, women’s voices were inconspicuously missing. The inconspicuousness of an omission so huge as to be monumental – women are, after all, more than half the population – was, in part, what led me to write. But to be honest, what spurred me more was a growing awareness of how readily a woman would not be heard, or would be misunderstood, when she gave voice to what she knew on the basis of her own experience, or said what she really thought.
With “In a Different Voice,” first the essay and then the book, I broke a silence. My silence. What I did not know at the time was that it wasn’t just my silence. Writing about a different voice, I had set out to remove a filter that kept aspects of human experience undercover, so to speak. But hearing the response to Anita Hill’s testimony, it was clear: that filter was still in place. Speaking was one thing, being heard was another. Anita Hill had spoken clearly, but what she said was not taken seriously.
Following the 2022 US Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it became legal, or legal again, for a state to silence a woman, so that in effect she has no voice and no choice if she becomes pregnant. Disrupting any comfortable progress narrative about women or women’s voices or about equal voice as the bedrock of democracy, the Court, by overturning Roe, has made the questions raised by In a Different Voice startlingly contemporary. In answer to the question “Why this book right now?” there is a relevant and poignant link between this moment and the time when I conducted the interviews that led to my discoveries. I will begin at the beginning.
The year is 1973. President Nixon has ended the Vietnam War draft and the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade has legalized abortion. I am teaching part time at Harvard. My PhD is in psychology, and, since receiving my degree in 1964, I have taught with Erik Erikson and also with Lawrence Kohlberg. In fact, it was their work on identity and on morality – specifically, Erikson’s insistence that you cannot take a life history out of history, that life history and history are intricately conjoined, and Kohlberg’s conviction that after the Holocaust, a stance of value neutrality or cultural relativism was untenable for the social sciences – that inspired me and drew me back into the field of psychology. Still, I was the mother of three young children, a modern dancer, and active in the civil rights and antiwar movements. As an undergraduate at Swarthmore, I had majored in English literature, and perhaps it was this in part that spurred my interest in how people think about themselves and about morality when they are facing real situations of conflict and choice. I was interested in questions of identity and morality, or, as Larry Kohlberg put it at the time, in the relationship between judgment and action.
And so, noticing a reticence among the men in the discussion section of Kohlberg’s course on moral and political choice, which I was leading – their outspokenness when it came to talking about the Vietnam War, which most considered unjust, but their silence when the subject became whether or not one should resist the draft, a choice that, upon graduation, many of them would face – I decided to follow these students and interview them when they were college seniors and the draft decision was upon them. And then President Nixon ended the draft.
So it was that the locus of my study shifted. I was looking for a situation where people have to make a choice, where issues of identity and morality are at stake, and where they will have to live with the consequences of their decision. Real versus hypothetical moral dilemmas. And the Supreme Court came to my aid. Roe v. Wade: 1973. My study would focus on abortion decisions, where people would come to a public place (pregnancy counseling clinics) and the decision would be made within a limited time frame. At the time, it didn’t strike me that the participants in the draft decision study were men, and in the abortion decision study they were women. My interest was in identity and moral development.
Between 1973 and 1975, together with Mary Belenky, then a graduate student at Harvard and also my neighbor and friend, I interviewed twenty-nine women who were in the first trimester of a confirmed pregnancy and who were considering abortion. The women were referred to our study from store-front clinics in Boston’s South End, from pregnancy counseling services (Preterm and Planned Parenthood), and from university counseling services. Some, teenagers especially, were referred by counselors who were concerned about repeated abortions; some came because they were unsure about what decision to make and welcomed the opportunity to talk; and some came because they wanted to contribute to research. The women ranged in age from 15 to 33 and were diverse in race, ethnicity, and social class. Of the twenty-nine women, four decided to have the baby, two miscarried, twenty-one chose to have an abortion, and two were undecided at the time of the interview and could not be contacted at the time of the followup study. Complete interview data were available for twenty-four of the women, and, of these, twenty-one were interviewed again at the end of the year following their decision.
In the winter of 1975–76, my husband and I moved from one suburb of Boston to another. For our three children, it was like moving from one world to another, because for them it meant new schools, new friends, and a new neighborhood to get used to. I stayed home that year to help them adjust to the change. I had a small research stipend to support the abortion decision study and, during the days when the children were in school, I would read through the interviews that Mary and I had conducted.
It was during that winter, on a day that remains etched in my memory, that my friend Dora Ullian came over. She was a graduate student studying psychology at Harvard, also interested in moral development. We were in the kitchen where I had been reading through the interview transcripts and I said, you know, I understand why psychologists have so much trouble understanding women. At the time, I was teaching (and Dora was studying) the theories of Freud and Erikson, Piaget and Kohlberg, all of whom had confessed to being puzzled by women, whom they observed to be less developed than men both in their sense of self and in their capacity for moral judgment. According to Freud, women have less sense of justice than men. On Kohlberg’s six-stage scale of moral development, women typically score at the third or interpersonal stage and are less likely than men to progress to the more abstract or principled stages of moral reasoning. According to Erikson, women fuse or confuse identity with intimacy, and Piaget observed that, in contrast to boys, girls give priority to relationships over rules.1
Reading through the interview transcripts, listening in particular for how the women speak about themselves and about morality, I heard a tendency to construct moral problems differently – to start as it were from a different place, that is, from an assumption of connectedness rather than separateness. I said some such thing to Dora and she said, “That’s interesting, why don’t you write about it?”
And that’s the origin of In a Different Voice. The abortion decision study was the impetus for the article and the centerpiece of the book, the focus of its two central chapters: Chapter 3, “Concepts of Self and Morality,” and Chapter 4, “Crisis and Transition.”2 Yet as far as I’m aware (my research here has been on Google), despite all the talk about In a Different Voice, there has been a radio silence around the abortion decision study. It’s almost never mentioned, and, if mentioned, it’s almost exclusively only by me.
The initial paper, which I wrote in the winter of 1975, circulated among my students who sent it to friends who sent it to friends. It was the time of purple mimeograph machines, and the essay circulated like samizdat, which fit with my sense of myself at the time as a member of some sort of underground. Then one day, one of these students, who was on the editorial board of the Harvard Educational Review, asked if he could submit the paper to the journal. And without thinking much about it, I said okay.
I don’t remember how long they kept it. Only that it came back saying, “Rejected.” Just that. No request to revise and resubmit. Just rejected. Along with the comment, “We don’t know what this is.”
And that got my back up. You don’t know what this is? I will add headings. Which I did, and sent it back to them.
This time when the paper came back, they said, “This is not social science.” They said if I would rewrite the paper in an impersonal voice and from an objective standpoint, they would consider it.
I said: “It’s called ‘In a Different Voice’.”
And for whatever reason, I suspect because by that time they were tired of dealing with me, or perhaps it was my insistence on being heard, they decided to publish the paper and be done with it.
That the essay went on to become a citation classic, the best-selling reprint of the Harvard Educational Review and the centerpiece of my 1982 book, makes this a good story to tell to graduate students who are tempted to withdraw in the face of rejection, or cannot imagine that In a Different Voice could have had such an inauspicious beginning. But telling this story recently, on two occasions when I was asked to speak about my book, I came to see that at the very outset “In a Different Voice” was recognized for what it was: a disruption. We don’t know what this is!
“But, you may say, …,” Virginia Woolf begins in A Room of One’s Own.3 Before saying a word on her subject, she anticipates interruption. She knows she will not be speaking about women and fiction in the way that people expect. Thus, she feels compelled to start by addressing people’s objections to what she will say.
bell hooks writes in a similar vein:
I was never taught absolute silence. I was taught that it was important to speak but to talk a talk that was itself a silence. Taught to speak and beware of the betrayal of too much heard speech. I experienced intense confusion and deep anxiety in my efforts to speak and to write.4
Once I realized that, from the very outset, “In a Different Voice” was recognized as a disruption – I was disrupting the conversation about psychology and morality by asking people to listen to the voice of that conversation – I came to an insight that solved what previously had been a puzzle. I saw how the disruption had been smoothed over, made less disruptive – and here’s the insight – because a problem in psychological and moral theory became a problem about women. Women. Oh, right, women. Women have always been a problem, but now we know that we should listen to women and include women in studies of human psychology because in fact women are humans – and so it goes on. All of which is true, but not really the point.
In a sleight of hand, “We don’t know what this is” had become “We know what this is.” “In a Different Voice” was about women and women’s development, about women being different from men. The different voice was coopted, conscripted one might say; heard as “feminine,” it was placed within the very framework or way of speaking about women and about morality that my focus on the idea of a different voice had challenged.
When a voice that protests and resists is silenced, the stage is set for a confusion of tongues, to borrow Ferenczi’s phrase. As a psychoanalyst, Ferenczi observed how patients who have been abused in childhood may come to identify with the aggressor. Having experienced their own voice as ineffective, they will speak in the voice of the aggressor, confusing that voice with their own.5
In the years immediately following publication of In a Different Voice, I set out to study girls’ development and also to clarify what I meant by a different voice and an ethic of care. Although both the different voice and caring sounded “feminine” and were associated with women, I was not an essentialist. Rather, the gendering of care and caring as “feminine,” together with the fact that I heard the voice of care ethics as a feminine voice, alerted me to the construction of gender as a binary (either masculine or feminine) and a hierarchy (privileging the masculine). To Socrates and Freud, to Kohlberg and Piaget, and in moral theory more generally, virtue is one and its name is justice. Care is a “supererogatory” duty: good, but not morally required (except of course in the case of women). The gender binary and hierarchy were obvious.
It became essential then for me to address the confusion between what sounds or is considered feminine and women. As the philosopher Manon Garcia puts it in the title of her recent book, We Are Not Born Submissive, it is “patriarchy [that] shapes women’s lives.”6
In a study published in the Merrill Palmer Quarterly in 1988 (“Two Moral Orientations: Gender Differences and Similarities”), Jane Attanucci and I looked at the relationship between moral orientation and gender. Analyzing the responses of medical students to Kohlberg’s hypothetical moral dilemmas, we found that the men divided 50/50 between those who oriented to justice only and those who introduced considerations of both justice and care into solving moral problems. With the women, a third considered justice only, a third spoke about both justice and care, and a third oriented to care only. Care is not essentially or exclusively a woman’s concern, although, at least in this sample of medical students, concerns about care and caring were articulated more often by women, and only women responded to moral problems by speaking solely about care.7
In a book chapter published the previous year (“The Origins of Morality in Early Childhood Relationships”), Grant Wiggins and I had observed that concerns about oppression (using power unfairly) and concerns about abandonment (failing to care) are human concerns, built into the human life cycle.8 Listening to children, one hears the appeal to morality in their cries, “It’s not fair!” and “You don’t care!”
