Joining the Resistance

A new book about Carol Gilligan is a significant event. Her most famous work is In a Different Voice, which is unusually influential on gender and human development. Here she shows how her key ideas arose out of her own experience, and also her research on adolescent girls who find themselves for the first time facing the dilemma between motives attributed to selfishness and selflessness, describing what they themselves wanted to do as selfish and what others wanted them to do as good. This led her to the insight that care is a feminine ethic within a patriarchal framework that a human ethic within the democratic framework. Her work helps heal the split between reason and emotion, mind and body, self and relationships, especially as they relate to gender identity. Girls should not have to choose between relationships and having a voice. There is much food for thought in this work.