Developing a different voice: The life and work of Carol Gilligan

Abstract

Objective

To explore the psychobiographical origins of Carol Gilligan's sensitivity to the importance of voice in human psychology, an awareness that, through her foundational written work, transformed the field.

Method

Narrative inquiry and analysis.

Results

Carol Gilligan's awareness of voice began at a young age with a self‐defining memory in which she learned to hold on to her own voice and experience. She never set out to be a social change agent, but she became one. Other scholars relied on her work, particularly the lyrical trope of “in a different voice” to change social (and psychological) attitudes toward women in many ways. This psychobiographical analysis traces Carol's personal struggles to sustain her own voice and knowledge, and these struggles met a culture that became able to hear something about how the patriarchal culture suppresses relational sensibilities. Rooted in a close and intense relationship with her mother, who expressed and imposed on her a duality between the voice of personal experience and the voice of meeting social expectations. Carol's understanding of the differing levels of what it means “to know” grounded a new conception of girls' development as well as of moral development.

Conclusion

Carol Gilligan became an agent of social change because her inner world and life path coincided with sociocultural readiness to embrace her work as giving voice to an emerging awareness of the suppression and denigration of women's sensibilities in psychology as well as in the larger culture. Her lifelong conflicts about speaking her own truth versus conforming to a society in which she was well able to be successful attuned her to the ways in which others, particularly women, similarly discounted their own experience.

1. INTRODUCTION

Life history, as Erikson (1977) put it, intersects with historical moments in those who effect social change. Carol Gilligan was at the forefront of a feminist revolution in psychology that led the field to consider the unique psychological configurations of women and to apply them more broadly. In her book, In a Different Voice (1982), she challenged psychology to make room for a different voice, the neglect of which in psychology suggested a kind of inferiority of women. Psychology, she said, “implicitly adopted the male life as the norm [and] tried to fashion women out of a masculine cloth (Gilligan, 1982, p. 6).” Theories derived from the study of men ignored “feminine” sensibilities and concerns and then marked women as deficient in developmental pathways derived from studying men. In particular, she disputed Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of stages of moral development in which women never attained the highest levels of moral reasoning, and she formulated an “ethics of care” that follows a different developmental sequence based on responsibility to self and others rather than on rights. The ethic of care is a different voice because it joins reason with emotion, mind with body, and self with relationships. While different from abstract and formal ethics of rights and rules—ethics of justice—the ethics of care is contextual and narrative and reflects a focus on the relationship, linking emotion to reason, that is coded as feminine in Western culture.

When she expanded her discovery of the absence of women's voices in major theory‐building studies in psychology and detailed how women see the world and develop their sense of self in relationship to others, the idea of “a different voice” resonated deeply both within and outside of psychology. Carol Gilligan's article “In a Different Voice: Women's Conceptions of Self and of Morality” appeared in 1977, just as the women's movement was gathering steam and was influential in philosophy, education, and history, as well as psychology In a Different Voice, both the article and the 1982 book, amplified these revolutionary trends and placed them squarely within a psychological framework.

Carol's ¹ work called attention to the ways in which psychology at the time was psychology of men—women were seldom included in studies, let alone theories. It was a clarion call to the field. The book has been cited, to date 2021, over 56,000 times and she was named, in 1996, by Time magazine, as one of America's 25 most influential people. In a Different Voice was translated into 20 languages, with more than 700,000 copies sold around the world. Her work was pivotal and foundational in the study of women and spurred hundreds of researchers to reframe psychology “in a different voice.” Her later research into the development of girls was equally transformative, as she demonstrated that adolescent girls resist the suppression of their inner knowledge under the weight of patriarchy (e.g., Gilligan et al., 2014). And this insight, too, led to a widespread rethinking of the developmental challenges that girls face (e.g., Gilligan et al., 1990). Carol accomplished both these revolutionary conceptual shifts by intensely listening to girls and women describing their experiences, a stance she called “radical listening” which was a cornerstone of her later “listening guide” approach to qualitative research (Gilligan, & Eddy, 2021).

The revolutionary moment in terms of Carol's social impact was the publication (and reception) of In a Different Voice (the book) which will be the main focus of this psychobiographical account. Up to that point, issues of voice were paramount in Carol's life and these predisposed her to listen to the voices of women. Her doing so would not, however, have sparked the paradigmatic shift in psychology had not the sociocultural surround been hungry for a new approach to understanding women.

At the time I first came across In a Different Voice, in 1982, I was embarking on a longitudinal follow‐up study of women's identity and finding very little in the psychological literature that illuminated what I was hearing from the women I was trying to understand. For me, as for many other scholars, Carol's book shifted the conceptual frame, and what had been in the shadows and difficult to articulate took shape. We could hear the relational paths along which the women we were studying developed, both in terms of their moral thinking and their orientation to their lives. A light went on for me and for many others. Although Carol would insist that her insight was about a suppressed human voice rather than an empirical generalization about sex differences, she offered a heuristic framework that influenced thousands of scholars.

The impact of In a Different Voice led scholars to view and study women through new lenses, lenses that eventually enlarged the study of all people. There was a direct line to Carol's later work on how girls' development was marked by their voices being pushed underground in the face of gendered social forces (see also Jack, 1991)—and the girls' efforts to resist the patriarchal social forces that were silencing them. This line of inquiry extended to the study of voice in boys' lives as well (see Chu & Gilligan, 2014; Way, 2011).

Carol Gilligan was not essentializing women and girls. Rather, she was among the first to call attention to how cultural ideologies, societal milieu, and embedded power structures (García Coll et al., 1996; Gilligan, 1982; Spencer, 1995) constructed gender as it was understood at the time. Although contemporary concepts of gender are much more fluid and nonbinary than they were 50 years ago, we have to recognize that third‐wave feminism built on the revolutions of the second wave, in which Carol's work played an important part.

2. THE POWER OF VOICE AND MY POSITIONALITY

In this psychobiography, I will use Carol's words liberally. As I am writing about voice and Carol was speaking to me about voice, I think about what kind of violation it is for me, as a psychobiographer, to replace her voice with my own. Therefore, I will wrap my voice around hers but keep her words as much as possible. At the same time, I am aware that transcribing her words omits the expressiveness (and often indignation) that characterize her speech and I hope that keeping the syntax of her talk will convey this—at least somewhat. Similarly, the reader will note that Carol presents much of her history by recreating the dialogue she had with others. These dialogues reveal her relationships with others and are also an important part of how she positions herself and moved forward in her life, so I have chosen to present many of the reported dialogues rather than to paraphrase them.

I write as an admirer, grateful to her for the paths she opened for me. In appreciation for her role in my own thinking, I gave her the first copy of my first book about women's identity. We have also had periods of friendship over 20 years. I feel great affection for her. I am largely writing from a hermeneutics of faith, re‐presenting Carol's reflections on her life, but the hermeneutics of suspicion is never far from my mind as I wonder about what is unsaid or what lies beneath (Josselson, 2004).

My question in doing this psychobiography is what led her to be able to hear voices of experience that had eluded psychology until she was able to highlight and theorize them. I started out thinking that she must have had a plan, a strategy to right wrongs, a need to lead change and call attention to the absence of women in psychology. As we explored her history, I found that I was imposing a framework on her that was rooted in the idea that if someone has great success in creating social change, they must have set out to do so and that one could trace their success to personality traits or earlier experiences that charted their course. I had imagined her to have a strong feminist history, to have had experiences of sexism in her life that led her to try to effect change. I thought her history would follow a “hero” trajectory, leading a movement. I had to dispense with all of these as my analysis led to something very different.

I also came to this study with my ingrained psychodynamic mindset and then came to the conclusion that the best conceptual framework to understand Carol Gilligan and her path is the framework that she created, the analysis of voice itself. She came to understand women through her experience of understanding herself and she wrote about her insights at a moment that the society was careening in the same direction.

3. METHOD

In that I regard interviews as the preferred method to access subjective meanings, I interviewed Carol for three hours over two recorded Zoom meetings. I began by asking her to tell me her life history with a focus on issues of voice. Because of our history of friendship, she knows and trusts me, and I felt that she narrated freely and spontaneously. I listened with few interventions except for occasionally asking for more detail. At several points, I made links between aspects of her story. She responded with some delight, “Yes, I hadn't seen that.” In this sense, the interview had the quality of collaboration, working together to make sense of her history. I asked her to read a draft of this article to ensure that I would not be publishing anything sensitive to her (see Ponterotto, 2014, 2017), but she did not ask for anything to be omitted. On reading my draft, Carol thought that my analysis was insightful and went beyond what she felt she told me in terms of abstracting themes of meaning.

I also (re)read many of her writings and talks and collaborated with Carol about how I have summarized them here.

My analysis of the interview transcripts followed the steps of narrative analysis (Josselson & Hammack, 2021) which involve multiple readings of the interview text. A first reading of the whole text identifies an overall gestalt. A second reading identifies the context and master narratives with which the narrative is in dialogue. Then I did a close reading of each sentence to identify the patterns and main themes in the narrative and to study their interconnection or layering. Finally, I tried to link the themes to an overarching conceptual frame.

As I read, I applied both a hermeneutics of re‐presentation (trying to convey as much as possible Carol's intended meanings) and a hermeneutics of demystification (looking for what might be unspoken or implied by the narrative structure itself) (Josselson, 2004) .

4. PSYCHOBIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS

4.1. Carol's path

Unlike many other social change agents, Carol did not have an early mission—either to change psychology or to change scholarly thought or to transform how educators regarded girls' development. Her life and the inner world ran on a course parallel to the larger social forces regarding women's place in society and in a psychological study, converged, and then erupted into an intellectual, and then social, revolution.

Born to first‐generation Jewish middle‐class parents in New York in 1936, Carol has a powerful self‐defining memory (Singer et al., 2013) from age 2½ years. Her mother, like many women of her generation, had dropped out of college (Cornell) to marry her father, who attended Cornell on a Regent's scholarship, went to law school at night, and in time became a highly successful lawyer. While without a profession of her own, her mother had a lively intellectual curiosity that extended to the arts and to psychoanalysis. The summer before Carol turned 3, her mother “heard of a summer program that was being run by Clara Thompson at Vassar College, and that was modeled on an Israeli kibbutz. It invited parents to bring their preschool children who would live in one building, and the parents would live in another building. The children would go to nursery school during the day while the parents would learn about child development from Clara Thompson and other psychoanalytic experts.”

“I loved the nursery school, and I loved my teacher whose name I still remember, which is extraordinary. At night, after spending time with their parents, the children would go to the children's building and the parents would go theirs. Well, this I wasn't prepared for. And so when nighttime came, and it was bedtime, I called for my mother. And I wouldn't go to sleep. And apparently, I cried so hard and unrelentingly‐ this is the story as told by my mother—I turned blue in the face. So much so that they had to get my mother. And she comes. And she has to put me to sleep. And so it turned out that my mother would come every night at bedtime. And it's even more than that. The way my mother tells the story is the following year, for some reason, she went back, I think, to try to sort of work this through with me or something. But with permission that she could put me to bed at night. So I was made the exception. And my mother would come and she would sing to me and all the other children, singing us to sleep every night. So you know, I think I learned at the age of two about the power of voice. That if you cry long enough and hard enough, it's almost like the walls can come tumbling down and the rules can change. And I mean, I got my mother to come and put me to bed. So I think that later, when I started to write about voice, I knew about voice from my own experience in this very powerful way.”

A self‐defining memory is vivid, affectively intense, and well‐rehearsed and reflects an individual's most enduring concerns (Singer et al., 2013). In its emotional power and specificity, this memory can become a kind of “prototypical scene” (Schultz, 2003). For Carol, protest and assertion of what she knew, especially when things did not “make sense” to her, were foundational to how she located herself in the world.

Carol's mother's response in this memory also epitomizes the complex relationship she and her mother had, a relationship that was foundational to Carol's later framing of girls' knowledge as they enter adolescence. The toddler Carol was the only one who refused to go to sleep without her mother. “She ultimately really valued that refusal in me, she encouraged it, but she also, I think, was fearful about it. I can imagine from my own adult perspective, I mean, you can imagine everybody else's child can deal with this, but not your child, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with your child? But you know, in the end, my mother supported me. And I learned that I'm with someone who listens.”

Voice entails a listener. Listening, Carol realized later, was part of the fabric of her identification as a Jew. A major Jewish prayer, which she learned as a child, is the Shema, which begins, “Hear O Israel.” She went to Hebrew school three times a week and learned modern Hebrew with an Israeli woman. She loved singing in choruses. “So voice and voices—it was very particular. It was very physical for me. Much later at Harvard, the students had me and Howard Gardner on the stage together. And I would say voice, and Howard would say, the concept of voice, the notion of voice. And I said, No! voice, you can hear it, it's physical … The first time I was really involved as an adult with the American Jewish community, I was talking about my work on radical listening as a way to address some of the breakdown in relationships, particularly between the Jewish community and the African American community in this country.”

In looking back, she realized that her views on radical listening derived in part from her Reconstructionist Jewish background. “The Shema'—, it's about voice and listening. I didn't see it. Except when I wrote about voice, I felt like I was writing from something I knew viscerally. Voice was never a concept or something abstract and theoretical; it had a kind of visceral meaning to me. And so I think what I took from my childhood is a very powerful experience, at a very young age, that you could change things through voice. Against all odds, this little two year old, who just wouldn't stop crying. And then, also the experience of a culture that's based on voice and listening, rather than images and looking.”

4.2. Mother's two voices

Central to Carol's psychological makeup was a sense of her mother's duality, a duality that for her, even had different names. While she was growing up, she heard two strong messages from her mother. One was “darling, you know,” meaning that she should trust her inner knowledge; the other was “what do you know?” meaning “let me tell you how this world works,” implying that she'd better find a way to fit herself into it. She stressed to me, “It's a conflict for me. How do you hold on to that inner voice which is the seed of any creative work? And at the same time, deal with whatever you have to deal with, with the committee on degrees? Or the person who says you can't do this?” The issue of how and what one knows would become paramount for Carol's later work on women as she discovered the ways in which girls' personal knowledge often failed in the face of patriarchal demands in adolescence.

Carol grew up an only child but was surrounded by people. Her whimsical, playful paternal grandfather lived with them, and her parents, who enjoyed socializing, usually had friends around who had children who became her primary playmates. And they were mainly boys. Her athletic father taught her to swim and play softball. Every summer, they would visit her parents' friends who had a son named Peter who became a special friend, with whom she would go fishing and blaze trails. “One summer my mother said we could no longer sleep in the same room. And we absolutely didn't understand this. My mother would come and sing to us at night. And then suddenly, she said, we couldn't … What was this about? And so that was when I learned about boys and about how you're supposed to be with them. And I thought, No, I didn't want to do that. It was at that point that my mother became concerned … And then my mother and I would have huge fights … Peter and I thought this was absurd. I mean, because what we did is we blazed trails, we went fishing, we went canoeing. I mean, sex was the furthest thing at that point.”

At music camp, Carol was the only girl on the boys' softball team, known as their secret weapon. She had girlfriends, too. Gender was not a big issue for her. “I was fine with being a girl. But I was a girl on my own terms. And I liked boys. I remember the arguments with my mother about how you're supposed to play the field with boys and sort of play, you know, hard to get. I mean, really, some of the cliches you know, why buy the cow if you can get the milk? Those kinds of, things, you know, because my mother was concerned, here's suddenly—this child is a girl and you don't want her to get pregnant and you don't want her to get a bad reputation. I mean, all the sort of sexual mores around that were ones that didn't make sense to me. I wasn't interested in playing that kind of game with boys. As a teenager, I was really interested in boys romantically. You know, I had a big crush on one of my classmates in high school and then at music camp on the conductor of the orchestra. And I don't think that sense of kind of playing it in some way that you were supposed to—those rules didn't make sense to me. So that was another time the rules didn't make sense to me, and with my mother, I would protest.”

But Carol's mother meant more to her than social rules. Following her discovery that Anna Frank, in editing her diary, had omitted her pleasure with her mother, Carol stresses how the arty, bohemian side of her mother was inspiring to her. She “adored” her even as she had to contend with the mother who had learned to be a good wife to a Wall Street lawyer, doing the required entertaining to promote his career. In her 2002 book, The Birth of Pleasure, she writes, My mother had two names. In talking to me, Carol tried to describe “that peculiar sensation of double consciousness where you have to see the world the way you actually see it, and then you have to see the world the way the world sees you, and wants you to see it. And of course, my work on girls is all about the resistance to losing your own voice.” This experience of double consciousness, ² nurtured in her complex relationship with her mother, became the cornerstone of what Carol could see psychologically and communicate to the world.

4.3. Education

Although Carol was academically successful throughout school, her adolescence seemed to me to be more typical of the times, the 1950s, a traditional, unquestioning period of conformity, and tranquility in American life. This decade saw the rise of television and ubiquitous televised sitcoms that idealized the white middle‐class family and featured women whose existences were defined by their families.

In high school, Carol was mainly interested in boys, singing in choruses, doing modern dance, playing the piano, and playing on the basketball team. Her description struck me as a fairly typical 1950s adolescent, although she was academically outstanding which was often problematic for girls, but not for her. Where she went to college did not matter much to her—in the 1950s, it was rare for girls to have career ambitions—and when she was rejected from the places others thought she could go, she followed her father's advice and went to Swarthmore. This, she said, “turns out to be the single best educational experience of my entire life.”

“It was not hard for me to get A's in school. But at Swarthmore. I fell in love with my schoolwork. In the Honors Program, I was an English major and a history and psychology minor. At Swarthmore in the Honors Program you're left to yourself. I would have just two seminars each week, and aside from that, nobody's telling you what to do. And you're in a seminar with seven students and a professor. You write a paper every week. And one week, I'm reading Virginia Woolf and one week I'm reading War and Peace. I'm living in this gorgeous place, with amazing professors. And there are no grades. And I fell in love with writing, and I fell in love with scholarship. And I fell in love with—what would you call it, the life of the mind.”

While at Swarthmore, still protesting rules that did not make sense to her, she led a fight against parietal rules. “I remember the argument being, you want us to act like adults in terms of our work ‐ we were completely left on our own to organize our intellectual life and write papers and turn them in. And we weren't being policed like little children. But then you want to police us socially. So if we can be responsible for ourselves intellectually, why can't we be responsible for ourselves sexually?” This, of course, is a more grown‐up version of her protest against not being able to sleep in the same room with Peter. And in the midst of honors exams in her senior year, she remembers sneaking out of her dorm room to spend the night with her boyfriend, incurring great risk.

She graduated with the highest honors in 1958. Although she did not form a vision of a career path at Swarthmore, she was clear in her mind that she wanted a life different from her mother's. This was 5 years before the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique . The malaise among women was there underground but solutions were not yet being seriously discussed. Carol's mother, with her wide‐ranging interests, was nevertheless the dutiful wife who supported her husband's career. “I feel my mother paid a price for that. But I feel very close to my mother these days and very, very grateful to my mother. I mean, I felt that there were vital parts of me, which she really went out of her way to nourish and encourage. The Hebrew school she chose for me was basically run by a musicologist; there was so much music and artwork as well as the Hebrew language. And she found a very special dance teacher. So she fed that creative part of me. At the same time that she wanted me to also follow certain choices that she made. I can say now, I mean, as a first generation American who lived through the Depression, she had no safety net under her. She and my father provided the safety net that made it possible for me to take the risks that I took.”

4.4. Falling into psychology and beyond

Looking back, Carol does not know how she ended up in psychology. She had had a minor in psychology at Swarthmore. “Should I go to graduate school in English? But I didn't want to spend my life analyzing other people's creativity. Should I go to medical school because my mother's friend said I should go to medical school?” She applied for a Marshall fellowship to go to England and study Shakespeare and also to graduate schools in clinical psychology. She was a finalist for the Marshall but “ended up” in Harvard's clinical psychology program. “And the first year of graduate school was so easy for me after the honors program at Swarthmore. I had all this time. So I read all of Freud and all of Chekhov, and all of Ibsen. I could not put together my understanding of the world, which was shaped by my studies of literature and my knowledge of history with what I felt like was the sort of two dimensional description of people [in psychology]—mother is cold, and father is distant. I mean, that's not an adequate description of a person. There was something about the way of talking about people that was alienating to me.”

Toward the end of graduate school, Carol accidentally got pregnant and that reshaped her direction. “It was like being delivered, you know? Because I loved it. Suddenly, I was having a child. I got married. Jim [her husband] went to medical school. So we moved to Cleveland, and I got involved in a performing modern dance troupe at an interracial arts center.” Her life became centered on dance, voter registration, and her child. She thought she was leaving psychology behind.

She did her thesis half‐heartedly and turned it in just before the birth of her second child. She had done an experiment on responses to temptation (the title of her thesis was: Responses to Temptation: An analysis of motives) where she took one group of children and read them a story about Andrew Carnegie and the robber barons. “And I turned these little children into cheaters.” The experiment involved a game where it was possible to see if the children cheated or not. To another group of children, she read a story about loyalty among a group of children. And that group did not cheat. Then she asked them for five adjectives to describe themselves and the ones who said honestly as the first one was overrepresented among the noncheaters. “So I wrote a dissertation that was roughly 70 pages, it was really short because my experiment came out and my point was that the literature equating morality with super ego development had missed the fact that temptation is a conflict situation. And if you change the parameters of the conflict, you can change the behavior. So I wrote this, and I got my degree.” She never tried to publish it, so alienated was she from the field.

Jim interned at the University of Chicago and had a friend in the dean's office who said to her, “‘You have a Harvard PhD, why don't you teach?’ And I thought, okay, I'll teach. Because we needed money.” Here serendipity guided her path. But as she narrates it, the option to teach occurs in reported speech, someone else's voice—and this recurs throughout her life narrative. Movement forward in Carol's life, as she describes her life history, occurs in relationship to others and, in the context of her narration, I do not think this is a conscious process. Rather, I see it as fundamental to Carol's knowledge about how women locate themselves in relationships.

Following the teachers she esteemed at Swarthmore, she taught in Chicago's renowned introduction to modern social sciences course where the students read Freud and Durkheim and Max Weber. “I mean, the classics. And I was teaching with David Bakan.” This was very exciting to her, revisiting the scholarship she had loved.

When Jim went back to Harvard for his residency and they still needed money, she looked for a part‐time teaching job. Through George Goethals, who had been a teacher of hers in graduate school, she was introduced to Erik Erikson and taught with him within his undergraduate course on the life cycle. “And I'll never forget going into that first class. He starts his class by showing Bergman's film Wild Strawberries. This combining of being an artist and a psychologist. That's what led me back into psychology. … I thought, if this is psychology, this is a home. I can work in this.” But she was still put off by the language in the clinical literature and the either‐or psychological methods.

She subsequently became a research assistant for Larry Kohlberg who hired her after reading her thesis. Kohlberg believed that after the Holocaust, the social sciences cannot take a stance of value neutrality and that the field of psychology had to grapple with moral issues. Kohlberg's work made sense to Carol—interviewing people and trying to understand how people reason about moral questions. At this point, Carol had three children and was active in the anti‐war movement and the civil rights movement. She was still doing modern dance.

But she was engaged by Kohlberg's work. “So I was interested in the relationship between judgment and action and in people's responses to real, as opposed to hypothetical, moral dilemmas. With a group of graduate students I decided to do a small study on how people respond to real dilemmas of conflict and choice. I was interested in identity and in moral development. And you can say anything about what a hypothetical person named Heinz should do, but what about when you have to live with the consequences of your decision? I started out to study Harvard students who were taking Kohlberg's course on Moral and Political Choice where I was a teaching assistant. As seniors in 1973, these students would be facing the Vietnam draft, and I was going to interview them at that time. But then in 1973, Nixon ended the draft. In 73, however, the Supreme Court legalized abortion, and I remember thinking, here's another situation where people come to a public place and make a decision that is going to affect their lives. … And I start listening, as it turned out, to pregnant women who were considering abortion…”

Carol, at this point, felt like a complete outsider in psychology. “I was a part time person. There was so much research money around and many faculty didn't want to teach. I was decorative. They said, ‘She has nice legs. And she has highest honors from Swarthmore.’ And so they didn't pay attention to what I was doing. And I said, you know, this moral development research is about what hypothetical people should do … Let's ask people about real decisions. And that's cool. And I had this group of students who joined me. And then with Mary Belenky who was a graduate student at that time, we interviewed pregnant women considering abortion at various places around Boston–street‐front clinics in the South End, and in University Health services. And that experience of listening to women is what led me to write “In a different voice.”

So Carol lit the spark following her inner knowledge—the “darling, you know” voice of her mother. She was investigating a truth she “knew” by deeply listening to women who were deciding on whether to have a baby or have an abortion. That the paper she wrote in the winter of 1975, written basically for herself, would have revolutionary consequences was something that, at the time, she could not have imagined.

4.5. In a different voice

“I had this small group of students with me, I always have this group around me. And we were countering a literature on moral development based on reasoning about hypothetical dilemmas. Really, you know, have you ever been in a lifeboat? How about real decisions? And in ‘73, following Roe v. Wade, Mary and I began interviewing pregnant women.” Carol received a small grant to study real life moral dilemmas and took a year off from her part‐time teaching to be with her 3 sons as they adjusted to a move from one suburb of Boston to another. “And then in the winter of ‘75 I'm reading the transcripts of these interviews. So I write this paper for nothing, for no one but myself. To make sense of something that had puzzled me‐ why women posed such a problem for psychologists. I felt I understood why. And then my paper started to circulate, first among my graduate students, and they sent it to other people. So it became like samizdat.”

“It's the first thing I write that's not for an assignment. I was writing in response to an inner voice saying, ‘If you want to know what I think about identity and morality’. And I felt protected by the fact that I thought no one is interested in what I think. … So this was the first time I wrote what I really thought about the psychology I was teaching. According to Freud, women have less sense of justice than men, and women tended to score lower than men on Kohlberg's six stage scale of moral development. To Erikson, women fused or confused identity with intimacy; to Piaget, girls, in contrast to boys, gave priority to relationships over rules. I was reading through the transcripts of interviews with a range of women‐ black and white, rich and poor, married and single. I remember saying to my friend Dora, ³ ‘I understand why psychologists are having so much trouble understanding women. Because women often start from a different place. They start from an assumption of relationship, not from an assumption of separateness.’ And Dora said, ‘That's really interesting. Why don't you write about it?’”

Carol had an informal weekly seminar in her house with graduate students. One was on the board of the student‐run Harvard Educational Review. “And he says, ‘Can I take it to the Ed review?’ ‘If you want to, sure,’ I said. I wasn't invested in academic publishing at the time. That wasn't my world. Teaching was my day job, and I loved teaching. But then the paper came back: Rejected. They said ‘we don't know what this is.' Well, thatgot my back up. I think ‘you don't know what this is?’ And I mean, here it was helpful to me that I was a top student, and I graduated with highest honors. So I'm not used to this kind of, you know, dismissal… So I thought—I will add headings. So I added headings. And I sent it back to them. They kept it for a while. And finally they sent it back to me. And they said, ‘Oh now we see what this is. But it's not social science. Because it's not written in the right way. It should be written in the passive voice and from an objective standpoint.' They said, ‘if you'll rewrite it in an objective voice and in the passive tense.' I said it's called ‘in a different voice.' I said you can't write Faulkner's novels in Hemingway's prose. So I think that by this time they were tired of dealing with me, and they decided to publish the paper and be done with it. And as it turned out, it's a great story to teach graduate students that when you get rejected, you don't go away, you go forward. So the article 'In a Different Voice' ends up being their all time, bestselling reprint, and it becomes chapter three of the book. The abortion study is the centerpiece (chapters three and four) of my 1982 book In a Different Voice, though, and I find this really interesting, no one talks about the abortion study in talking about that book. But to me, it was critical. It was women contesting a culture that had said, if you want to be a good woman, you must be selfless, meaning without a voice of your own. The abortion decision study took place at the moment where the Supreme Court said to women you have a legitimate voice in making this decision, and it catches that historical moment.”

4.5.1. Catches that historical moment

This, to me, is the crucial intersection of life history and sociocultural history. The elements were in place—a brilliant, articulate woman with a history of protesting what did not make sense to her, working on the fringe of Harvard with its respectability and clout, speaks in an unusual way to an audience that is now ready to hear. In 1977, when the Harvard Educational Review paper was published, second‐wave feminism was beginning to flower. Our Bodies, Ourselves, the feminist health manifesto that led women to take charge of their bodies and health in opposition to a male‐dominated medical establishment, was published in 1970, and by the mid‐1970s had attracted a wide readership. When Carol wrote the paper “In a Different Voice”, she was trying to formulate what she “really thought” about the psychology she was teaching and felt very alone at the time. It was only after she discovered that she was not alone that she became part of various women's groups around Boston.

Before that, she was certainly aware of second‐wave feminism. When she taught in Chicago in the mid‐60s, Naomi Weisstein had done a survey that found that the men teaching Introduction to modern social sciences were called assistant professors and paid more than the women (Naomi and she among them) who were called instructors. Also many women she knew as mothers were going back to get advanced degrees. But whatever influences came from the ripples of feminism in the air, the crucial moment for Carol came while sitting at her kitchen table reading transcripts of women considering abortion, and “literally hearing a voice that differed from the voice of psychological theory with its premise of separateness and the premium placed on individual autonomy, and suddenly realizing why women were so often misunderstood or found wanting when it came to development. I understood why psychologists have had so much trouble understanding women. And then my friend Dora came over and she was a graduate student in psychology, and it was important to me that she found it interesting.”

Carol felt that she understood the women in the abortion study and how what some of them were saying would not make sense within the prevailing paradigm or framework of competing rights (right to life vs. right to choose) or would be misheard. For example, she told me that a woman who was planning to have an abortion could not say that the fetus was a life without being called a murderer, even though she clearly felt it was a life or a potential life, and the whole issue of choice was very different when conceived within a network of relationships. For many women, it was not simply the fetus and the mother who was involved but a whole network of connections who would be affected by the outcome of the woman's decision. “It was really a question of suddenly seeing a paradigm and realizing why so often women (myself included) felt unheard or unable to be heard if we were to say what we thought or misunderstood if we did speak for ourselves. And then I really became part of second wave feminism.” Carol's path and the path of feminism thus converged.

4.6. Life history and the historical moment

Questions about influence plague the psychobiographer. One difficulty lies in reconstructing the foundational assumptions at any historical moment. I appreciate the courage and even audacity of Carol writing that paper by reconstructing my own experience at the time. In 1970, I was also doing pathbreaking work in trying to study identity formation in college women. “If there was someone you wanted to know you, what sorts of things would you tell them about yourself?” I asked at the outset of an intensive interview. They all responded by telling me about the people who were important in their lives and their relationships with them. These were women who were pathfinders in the sense of seeking careers at that time, planning to join work life to marriage and motherhood, and I was both surprised and chagrined to hear them tell me about relationships over goals or ideology. I wanted to hear about “real” identity, the autonomous self, hammered out of occupational ambition and ideology, the kind of identity that Erikson talked about. But it simply did not occur to me to challenge the theory or the paradigms. I felt there was something either “wrong” with me or with my participants.

Carol, on the other hand, was able to write, at the beginning of her paper, “In a Different Voice”(1977), “the men whose theories have largely informed this understanding of development have all been plagued by the same problem, the problem of women, whose sexuality remains more diffuse, whose perception of self is so much more tenaciously embedded in relationships with others and whose moral dilemmas hold them in a mode of judgment that is insistently contextual. The solution has been to consider women as either deviant or deficient in their development (Gilligan, 1977, p. 482).” In listening closely to her participants in the abortion study, she was able to formulate that what was “wrong” in psychology lay in the dominance of a particular frame of reference, a male one, in privileging independence over interdependence, reason over emotion, the self over relationships.

My position, then, is that talk about women and their exclusion from male bastions of power and privilege (and here I am speaking the language of the 21st century) was in the surround when she was formulating her ideas, but the ideas themselves came from her inner knowledge and her readiness to trust what she felt she knew and understood. She had what Erikson (1977) called “the pertinacity and the giftedness” (p. 164) to speak through her writing, and others, hearing their own experiences echoed, followed, and elevated her as their leader and champion.

4.7. Taking up the challenge

Once Carol's paper was heralded and she came to see that her views resonated deeply with others, Carol got engaged in challenging the prevailing ethos of her academic field. “They said, you do not have the right method. Here we go. We're heading right to the Journal of qualitative psychology. ⁴ They say you do not have a coding system. Well, my work is a challenge to the binary logic of coding systems. So then I write my book. And I get all this validation, I had thought it was just me who was having this problem. So then I got drawn in. And once I get drawn in, I cannot be constantly answering to the people who see the methodological problem as mine. They were the people who did not even see the absence of 50% of the population from their samples.” [Here there is indignation in Carol's voice]. Once invested, Carol realized that to make her argument have weight and move it forward, she needed tenure.

This is another crucial moment in Carol's career in which she had to make the step from outsider to academic respectability. She had been offered a faculty appointment to teach at Harvard in 1970 when “there was a lot of money around in the social sciences, and people wanted to do their research and they needed someone to teach a large introductory course on adolescent development that no one wanted to teach. I came with very classy academic credentials, I was a summa cum laude graduate from Swarthmore with a Harvard Ph.D. I wasn't interested at the time in an academic career or in doing research particularly. I was looking for a part‐time job. I had three children, and they needed someone to teach.” In other words, she wasn't taken seriously.

When she realized she needed tenure, several of the few women on the faculty supported her. Tellingly, they advised her not to press her argument about psychology's failure to include half the population in their studies. When some of the faculty complained that she did not understand statistical regression, one of the senior women faculty members advised her, “let them help you.” This was a customary female strategy to enlist male support. Their message was “let them teach you about regression around the mean, even though it's completely irrelevant to your work and you already know it.” Initially, Carol protested, “they want to talk with me about methods when they are the ones who left out half the sample, and she said to me, ‘don't go there’.” So she didn't. Looking at this moment from this distance, we can see that Carol once again heard her mother's voice telling her ‘what do you know?’ and this time she acted on that voice. They were telling her ‘don't say what you know, don't say what's true about your work, just act as if this makes sense.' And she got tenure.

But she joined the women's faculty on the fringes of the department where her position “on the periphery gave me huge freedom.” Outside of Harvard, her work was gaining intense interest. “I would be invited to talk to psychology departments and researchers would stand up, usually guys, saying ‘Oh, you know when I published my research … I couldn't make sense of the women's responses, so I left out the women and now that I think about it, I never mentioned that in the article’ … So there was a kind of general acknowledgement that this had been a major problem in the field. It was like a kind of come to truth moment. I remember as a graduate student being told by David McClelland, who was my department chairman and who became my thesis advisor, that if you add women to your data it just complicates the analysis, so just study men." Indeed, I had had the same experience as a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s where several (male) professors averred that you shouldn't study women because ‘nothing ever comes out with them.' This was wisdom we women in psychology all simply accepted.

I asked Carol how Erikson and Kohlberg responded to her work. “I really admired Erikson. I thought his work was beautiful. It was brilliant. Kohlberg started a vibrant discussion about morality and moral development. He had been part of the Haganah and helped smuggle Jews into Palestine. I admired these people, and then was astonished to realize that they could have done research in psychology and leave out women! [indignation again]. That's when I saw how culture can blind you to the obvious. And I had these great students working with me, [working] in the center of the patriarchy. Larry Kohlberg wrote a very effusive blurb for In a Different Voice. He said I had helped him to make sense of his own data that he hadn't understood. He and I later taught together for several years and we openly disagreed. He said, ‘Your work is a B route through my stages’. And I said, ‘No my work reframes your stages.’ Erikson also applauded my work but he said, ‘you're not saying I should change my theory.’ And I said, ‘actually, I am. Here's your theory of the eight stages of life except you say it doesn't quite apply to women who join identity with intimacy. And he said,’ But Joan has done a weaving of the stages, do you want to unravel the weaving?' And I thought, actually, yes, I want that rewoven.”

At this point, Carol was ready to lead a charge for rethinking women's place in psychology as well as in the patriarchal culture that surrounded people in the early 1980s. Later, when In a Different Voice became a Harvard Press bestseller, translated and read around the world, Harvard described it as “the little book that started a revolution.” Carol, though, felt she had known from the beginning that her ideas were revolutionary and her struggle was with when and how to say so. “I think from the beginning I knew it was a revolution, but I had to sort of not know it. I thought for a long time I could stay within the old framework.” She had been persuaded to soft‐pedal the methodological revolution in order to get tenure at Harvard, acting as though she could somehow fit her revolutionary work into the old paradigms. But she felt she once again had to try not to know what she knew. “They said my work was not psychology, the department in which I have more graduate students than anyone. My students were getting their dissertations published by Harvard press but my work wasn't taught by my colleagues. In the committee on degrees, my students were being told that their research isn't science.”

But as Carol's ideas were being addressed in the larger culture, she had to resist the way in which they were being twisted into old frameworks which focused on the question of whether women were different from men. Carol said she called her book In a Different Voice because she was trying to call attention to a different human voice. She had said in the introduction to In a Different Voice that she hoped “to expand the understanding of human development by using the group left out in the construction of theory to call attention to what is missing in its account (1982, p. 4).” She turned away from the debates about gender differences in moral development in order, as she said, “to protect the part of myself that wrote that book.” She resisted those who wanted to reframe her work on their terms and override her voice.

Aware that there was almost no research on adolescent girls, ⁵ she decided that she wanted “to fill in this missing stretch of psychological history.” Rather than comparing women with men, she would connect women with girls. Accompanied by her graduate students, she set out to listen to girls. The plan was “to make girls the narrators of coming of age and just ask them to take us into their world and tell us about their experiences.” This led her to what she considered to be “the most radical work I've ever done.”

Carol's research with girls, research conducted with her graduate students while she was at Harvard, mapped what “were called developmental challenges to separate the self from relationships, the mind from the body, and thought from emotion. I came to see these moves not as steps in development, but as a process of initiation to which there was a healthy resistance that we heard among girls. It was like, wait a minute I know this voice. It was at once familiar and surprising, it was almost like a visceral experience for myself and other women: listening to girls' voices at the edge of adolescence and remembering a voice that we had learned to dismiss or discount as ‘stupid’, or ‘rude’ or ‘crazy’ or ‘wrong’. And then we would hear girls doing just that, dismissing what they had loved as ‘stupid’ and beginning to not say what they saw and not know what in another sense they knew.”

She understood that the structures of a patriarchal culture had to undercut these relational capacities in order to maintain its hierarchies. “… I remember being fascinated by the word ‘resistance’ and thinking, as the healthy body resists infection, the healthy psyche resists losing basic human capacities like the ability to pick up what's going on with other people. Resistance to a culture that requires as the price of admission the splitting of basic psychological functions, like separating thought from emotion. This is what Damasio writes about. And later we could show that boys resist this too, only for boys, the initiation starts earlier. In a patriarchal culture, the human voice is a voice of resistence. It took me a long time to come to this clarity about In a Different Voice. It was never called ‘in a woman's voice,’ I called it a different voice, and the difference I heard was from what I came to recognize as a patriarchal voice. My research illuminated the pressures people experience to discount the voice of their experience and take on the voice of how they are supposed to talk about whatever.”

Carol vividly remembered teaching with Erikson in the life cycle course, “and I was teaching about mothers and small children. I had three small children at that time, and I would put my children to bed and then I would open these books and try to memorize how I was supposed to talk about mothers and young children because I knew that if I just said what I knew as the mother of young children that I would get it wrong, that's not how you're supposed to talk about mothers and young children. Like you're supposed to say your baby isn't smiling at you, the baby has gas. I had learned that if I said my experience, then I was told no because babies at that age are egocentric and they have no capacity for object relations so if you think your baby's relating to you, either you're crazy or it's wishful thinking.”

It is the same process that Carol resisted in teaching Erikson's assertion that women do not have a sense of identity since they fuse identity with intimacy and that women have less sense of justice since the highest stage they reach in Kohlberg's model is the interpersonal stage. The issue of voice is speaking from inner knowledge versus the requirements of the social surround, a conflict often at the center of women's experience (and sometimes, of men's).

Carol came to her understandings empirically (not statistically) by carefully listening to girls and listening for the layers of their knowledge. This involved a radical change in approach to research. Over the 5 years of a longitudinal study of girls in a Cleveland school, she and her research team learned to develop a relational form of interviewing (Gilligan, 2015) that made it possible for the girls to speak about what they knew to be true in their worlds—and for the women conducting the research to hear them (Brown & Gilligan, 1992). And, recognizing the value of and importance of relationships, Carol always worked collaboratively and deeply engaged with graduate students with whom she coauthored or coedited five books and many papers published in leading psychology journals.

One of the most creative of her/their insights, one that I always teach in my interviewing seminars, is hearing girls say “I don't know” in their interviews. This is so often treated as a speech tic and usually left out of transcripts. All people who work with transcripts find it, but Carol was able to discern its meaning. Perhaps it was her lifelong struggles about knowing what she knew that made its meaning apparent to her. “We started with seven year old girls, and it was a five year longitudinal study and as they reach adolescence, suddenly, the phrase ‘I don't know’ started, you could chart it. It would be seven times, and then the same interviewee a year later it would be 14 and then it would be 28. And you realize the phrase ‘I don't know’ in this instance wasn't an admission of ignorance ‐I don't know about Newton's theory of gravity or something like that. It served as a cover for knowledge, by literally putting the word ‘don't’ between ‘I’ and ‘know.’And we saw girls beginning to not know what in fact they knew… I found myself at that time starting to ask girls questions that were the antithesis of what I had been taught as an interviewer. They would say something, and I would ask, Is that true? And they would say, 'actually … 'and then I would hear the story under the story, the 'actual”'story. For example, one girl said, 'I don't like myself enough to look out for myself.'And when I asked her, 'Do you really feel that way?' she said, 'actually, this is how I look out for myself—by never saying what I really feel. That way whatever anyone says about me, I don't care because they don't know who I am.'”

Carol's later books, including Meeting at the Crossroads (written with her student Lyn Mikel Brown and a 1992 NY Times notable book of the year), gave voice to the struggles of girls who either fought for their voices or succumbed to being silenced (Brown & Gilligan, 1992). She tells about encountering a woman by chance who said, “Oh, you're Carol Gilligan. You changed my way of seeing nine year old girls.” And Carol said, “that is so meaningful to me. If she heard the voice of a nine year old girl, one who says what she sees and knows what she knows‐ I feel like that's it for me. That's enough, that she can actually hear that nine year old and before she couldn't hear it.” For Carol, helping others hear girls in a new way was central to her sense of her contribution. Resonance with others, not statistical validation, is the yardstick by which Carol evaluated the meaningfulness of her work. And her work resonated with scholars in fields as diverse as a business (e.g., Nicholson & Kurucz, 2019), educational leadership (e.g., Smit, 2014), nursing (e.g., Covington, 1998), and sociology (e.g., Covington, 1998).

Carol saw both In a Different Voice and the studies of girls as beginning a conversation. “The most radical message is that what was called ‘the truth’ is a voice. And here's a different voice. And that different voice is a human voice.” Throughout these years, Carol felt herself in a psychological thicket. As she dealt with all the challenges and arguments her work produced, she felt that she was right back to

‘Darling, you know and What do you know?' She felt she had to protect the part of herself that wrote that book. She did not want to fight or argue; she resisted others' reframing of her complex message. She wanted to continue to write what she knew.

Carol never set out to be a social change agent, but she became one. She was gratified to realize she was part of a movement, a powerful feminist movement, and that others were relying on her work, particularly the lyrical trope of “in a different voice” to change social (and psychological) attitudes toward women in many ways. “So the thought that I've had a role in that and have contributed to it is very meaningful to me, but it's not what I set out to do.” But what has been most meaningful to her has been the strangers who have recognized her and told her they were grateful to her for helping them to understand their daughters or their marriages or themselves by giving them words to explain what they were hearing and also thinking and feeling.

Carol finds larger social meaning in her work. “We have within us the capacity to resist those structures which undermine the capacities to resist injustice. Racism, sexism, homophobia. The girls work is not ultimately about girls. The girls' voices are informative about something that otherwise it's very easy to miss—which is that there's a resistance to losing basic relational capacities and girls were naming it.”

Carol's personal struggles with holding on to her own voice and knowledge met a culture that became able to hear. This revolutionized psychology in terms of attending to women and their development and also in terms of methodology which stressed the need for listening to the voices of people's experiences, including the story beneath the story on the surface. Her focus on relational listening (summarized in Gilligan & Eddy, 2021) became a springboard for psychology to listen relationally to marginalized and intersectional groups and for qualitative methods that privilege subjective experience (Gergen et al., 2015). Most recently, Onnie Rogers and Niobe Way (2021) credit her with mapping the dynamics of resistance and accommodation in the face of sociocultural oppression. Thus, her impact went far beyond the study of women.

4.8. Resisting the (my) psychobiographer's framework

In writing this piece, I have struggled against my wish to make Carol into a hero, a general leading a battle. I wondered why she did not fight her critics or form a women's army within psychology, as she could have. Earlier I used the phrase “led the charge” and I see how much this is my framing, not hers.

I had to listen to Carol, and what I understood was that her personality, unlike mine, was to be comfortable on the fringes where she could speak her truth. She read, she thought, she tried to make sense of what she encountered. People could either hear what she said, resonate with what she felt she had come to know—or not. She truly did not care about being an insider and this is what gave her the freedom to speak. Freedom meant being able to dismiss the “What do you know?” voice and say what she knew.

4.9. Postscript

Stellar students flocked to the Harvard Ed School to work with Carol and someone else might have settled happily into a secure position. She received both adulation and resentment for her fame. (I know this firsthand because I took her place in 1993–1994 while she was on sabbatical.) But she wearied of the administrative demands and the expectation that she would continue doing what she had been doing. When she was offered a University professorship at NYU in 2001, she left Harvard. Being outside a departmental structure offered her the freedom she cherished. She wrote a novel (2008), got involved with theater, and began writing about patriarchy (2018). She continues to write what she feels she knows.

5. CONCLUSION AND LIMITATION

Carol Gilligan became an agent of social change because her inner world and life path coincided with sociocultural readiness to embrace her work as giving voice to an emerging widespread awareness of the suppression and denigration of women's sensibilities in the larger culture. Her lifelong conflicts about speaking her own truth versus conforming to a society in which she was well able to be successful attuned her to the ways in which others, particularly women, similarly discounted their own experience. Rooted in a close and intense relationship with her mother who expressed and imposed on her a duality between the voice of personal experience and the voice of meeting social expectations, Carol's understanding of the differing levels of what it means “to know” something grounded a new conception of girls' development. Her awareness of voice merged with her roots in a Jewish culture takes listening as fundamental, and she learned to prize listening as well as giving voice. Through attentively listening to girls and women with an open mind, she formulated an “ethics of care” in distinction to an “ethics of rights and justice” that is central to the “different voice” she articulated. While she saw this as a human voice encoded as feminine in our culture, women from different fields took this up as an aspect of women's psychology to be valued and nurtured rather than deemed inferior in moral development.

Where psychology had been privileging the separate, autonomous self, Carol demonstrated that one could also tell the story of human development as the interdependence of a connected self. Carol also challenged psychology as being a psychology of men and argued for the irrationality of excluding women from psychological studies. All these ideas coincided with a rising tide of feminism in psychology and in the larger society and provided an intellectual framework for attending in a different way to women's experiences.

Carol Gilligan's work became a rallying point in scholarship and in the wider society because the culture was ready to embrace it. There was a nascent subterranean movement growing increasingly restive, awaiting a leader. To make my argument more persuasive in regard to the revolutionary nature of Carol's work, a fuller picture of the sociocultural context in regard to women, and women in psychological theory in particular, in the 1970s would be needed. In this paper, I have offered some specific examples, but I was unable to show the pervasiveness of how women were viewed, stereotyped, and disparaged in this era. Given how far psychology as a field has come in the ensuing 40 years, it is hard to reconstruct a social and intellectual mindset that simply overlooked women or meekly accepted declarations of their various deficiencies. Readers who lived through the years before 1970 will immediately recognize the shift in thought (and behavior) that occurred; readers who did not will perhaps have to watch Mad Men for what I think of as the best depiction of the atmosphere of the times regarding (and mindlessly degrading) women.

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Jefferson Singer, Jon Adler and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the draft of this paper.

7. ETHICS STATEMENT

Carol Gilligan chose what she would disclose to me in our interviews and gave her permission and agreement about what I have I disclosed to the readers of this paper.

Josselson, R. (2023). Developing a different voice: The life and work of Carol Gilligan. Journal of Personality, 91, 120–133. 10.1111/jopy.12763