Carol Gilligan (; born November 28, 1936) is an American philosopher and psychologist, known for her work in feminist theory, ethical community, and ethical relationships.
Gilligan is a professor of humanities and applied psychology at New York University and a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. Her influential book, In a Different Voice (1982), theorized that moral decisions are guided by different interior voices and perspectives, a view contrary to Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
In 1996, Time magazine listed her among America's 25 most influential people. She is the originator of the ethics of care and has been called "perhaps the world’s leading authority" on active listening.
Biography Early life and education Carol Gilligan was raised in a Jewish family in New York City. She was the only child of a lawyer, William Friedman, and nursery school teacher, Mabel Caminez. She attended the public Hunter Model School and the Walden School, a progressive private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side and played piano.
Gilligan earned a B.A. in English literature summa cum laude from Swarthmore College, a master's degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College, and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University where she wrote her doctoral dissertation "Responses to Temptation: An Analysis of Motives". Disillusioned by academia, Gilligan worked for a time for a modern dance company in Cleveland.
Career She began her teaching career as a lecturer at the University of Chicago (where her husband was a medical intern) from 1965 to 1966, teaching the Introduction to Modern Social Science. She then became a lecturer at Harvard University in 1967, lecturing on General Education. After becoming an assistant professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1971, she received tenure there in 1988 as a full professor. Gilligan taught for two years at the University of Cambridge (from 1992 to 1994) as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions and as a visiting professorial fellow in the Social and Political Sciences. In 1997, she became Patricia Albjerg Graham Chair in Gender Studies at Harvard. From 1998 until 2001, she was a Visiting Meyer Professor and later visiting professor at New York University School of Law.
Gilligan and Kristin Linklater co-founded an all-female theater group called the Company of Women in 1991. For the group, Linklater was the voice instructor. Around this time, Gilligan attended a Shakespeare & Company workshop on acting. Gilligan's theater work and gained knowledge on what "voice" really is led Tina Packer to ask Gilligan to draft a script for The Scarlet Letter.
In early fall of 2002, Gilligan released a theater adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, originally written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Gilligan's son, Jonathan Gilligan, worked on writing the play with her. The play first opened on September 14, 2002, at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. While most of the story's content remained the same, Gilligan used the play as a vehicle to present many of the concepts on which she had been working. She related how the patriarchy not only maintains strict gender roles, but also how it prevents true pleasure in relationships between people. Gilligan said that Hawthorne was demonstrating that "you could overthrow kings, and still the tension between puritanical society and love and passion would continue". In Gilligan's adaption, she suggested that we have inherited Pearl's world where women do not necessarily have to worry about having an "A" on their breasts.
Gilligan eventually left Harvard in 2002 to join New York University as a full professor with the School of Education and the School of Law. She was a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in the Centre for Gender Studies from 2003 until 2009.
Gilligan studied women's psychology and girls' development and co-authored or edited a number of texts with her students. She contributed the piece "Sisterhood Is Pleasurable: A Quiet Revolution in Psychology" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan. She published her first novel, Kyra, in 2008. In 2015, Gilligan taught for a semester at New York University in Abu Dhabi.
Psychology Gilligan is known for her work with Lawrence Kohlberg on his stages of moral development as well as her criticism of his approach to the stages. As his research assistant, Gilligan argued that Kohlberg's stages were male-oriented, which limited their ability to be generalized to females. In an article where Gilligan revisited In a Different Voice, she commented:
Gilligan proposed her theory of stages of female moral development based on her idea of moral voices. According to Gilligan, there are two kinds of moral voices: that of the masculine and the feminine. The masculine voice is "logical and individualistic", meaning that the emphasis in moral decisions is protecting the rights of people and making sure justice is upheld. The feminine voice places more emphasis on protecting interpersonal relationships and taking care of other people. This voice focuses on the "care perspective", which means focusing on the needs of the individual in order to make an ethical decision. For Gilligan, Kohlberg's stages of moral development were emphasizing the masculine voice, making it difficult to accurately gauge a woman's moral development because of this incongruity in voices. Gilligan argues that androgyny, or integrating the masculine and the feminine, is the best way to realize one's potential as a human. Gilligan's stages of female moral development has been shown in business settings as an explanation to the different ways men and women handle ethical issues in the workplace as well.
Gilligan developed her own stages of moral development with the idea that women make moral and ethical decisions based on how they will affect others in mind. She followed Kohlberg's stages of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional morality, but she based these upon her research with women rather than men, a major advance in psychological theory. These three stages also have two transitions between the three steps of morality.
The first stage is pre-conventional morality. This stage revolves around self-interest and survival. When a conflict arises between the needs of oneself and the needs of others, a woman will choose her own needs first. Transition number one states that during this transition, a woman realizes her responsibility for others and that she could have previously been thinking selfishly. The second stage of three is conventional morality. This stage revolves around being selfless and prioritizing care for others. A woman realizes the needs of others and cares for them over herself, leading to self-sacrifice. After the second stage is the second of the two transitions. Transition two states that during the second transition, a woman realizes her needs are just as important as the needs of others. She realizes she must balance the needs of herself and the needs of others. This is a shift from "goodness" to "truth" as she honestly assesses the needs of each, not just as a responsibility. Finally, the third stage is post-conventional morality. This stage involves women paying attention to how their actions affect others, and taking responsibility for those consequences, good and bad. Women also take control of their own lives and show strong care for others. Here, a woman realizes the needs of herself are just as important as the needs of others, thus leading to the universal ethic of care and concern.
In a Different Voice goes deeper into Gilligan's criticism of Kohlberg and the stages of moral development of women, and was one of the accomplishments that put her at the forefront of the feminist movement.
Philosophy As a feminist, Gilligan has many works on women, especially girls during the time of adolescence. The following works are a few of her most notable pieces.
In a Different Voice
After entering the dialogue regarding women and morality in the 1960s, Gilligan published what is considered one of her most influential works in 1982. Before she conducted her research Gilligan knew that "psychologists had assumed a culture in which men were the measure of humanity, and autonomy and rationality ('masculine' qualities) were the markers of maturity. It was a culture that counted on women not speaking for themselves". She wanted there to be an opportunity for women to speak up since the nature of psychology led people to believe women had inferior qualities. To explore this theory further, Gilligan conducted her research using an interview method. Her questions centered around the self, morality and how women handle issues of conflict and choice. Her three studies that she references throughout the work were the college student study (moral development), the abortion decision study (experience of conflict), and the rights and responsibilities study (concepts of self and morality across men and women of different ages).Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. From these studies Gilligan formed the framework for her ethics of care.
Gilligan also makes commentary on how current theory did not apply as easily when looking at a woman's perspective. She uses Freud as her first example, as he relied on "the imagery of men's lives in charting the course of human growth." Yet in doing so, Freud struggled to apply his work to the experiences of women as well. Gilligan continues to target this absence of the feminist perspective by look at a scenario involving two adolescent children. By using Kohlberg's six stages of moral development, Gilligan attempts to analyze both the boy and girl's answers to the question of whether a man should steal medicine to save his wife. Gilligan realizes that the girl's responses seem to place her a whole stage lower in maturity than the boy. However, Gilligan argues that this is a result of the children seeing two different moral problems. The boy sees this as a problem of logic whereas the girl seems to see this as a problem of human relationships. Gilligan points out that Kohlberg's explanation gives reason for why the boy's perspective is more mature, but gives no reason why the girl's perspective may be just as mature in other ways, suggesting the Kohlberg's system does not apply to all. In conducting a second interview between two new participants of the opposite gender, she finds similar results where the girl sees the situation less in terms of logic, but more in terms of a web of human relationships. Gilligan concludes this section saying how Freud is not necessarily correct in saying that girls have an intensification of narcissism during puberty, but that they develop a deeper perspective of care and "a new responsiveness to the self".
Furthermore, Gilligan introduces In a Different Voice by explaining that "the different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but theme. Its association with women is an empirical observation, and is primarily through women's voices that I trace its development. But this association is not absolute and the contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus on a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex." Regardless of the findings Gilligan made from her study, her ethics of care and the fuel for her study have called future researchers to broaden the scope of studies and consider intersectionality more as well.
As of 2022, In a Different Voice had been translated into 20 different languages and sold over 700,000 copies.
Theory