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This is the little book that started a revolution. First published almost twenty years ago, it made women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond. Translated into sixteen languages, with more than three-quarters of a million copies sold around the world. In a Different Voice has inspired new research, new educational initiatives, and political debate-and helped many women and men to see themselves and each other in a different light. Carol Gilligan believes that psychology has persistently and systematically misunderstood women--their motives, their moral commitments, the course of their psychological growth, and their special view of what is important in life. Here she sets out to correct psychology's misperceptions and refocus its view of female personality. The result is truly a tour de force, which may well reshape much of what psychology now has to say about female experience.
E-Book Content
In a Different Voice
In a
Different Voice Psychological Theory and Women's Development
Carol Gilligan
Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
Copyright 0 1982, 1993 by Carol GDligan All rights reserved Printed in the United States ofAmerica Thirty-eighth printing 2003 library 01Congress CatalogIng In PubUcatlon Data GiDigan, Carol, 1936In a ditJerent voice.
Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Women-Psychology-Longitudinal studies. 2. Developmental psychology-Longitudina1 studies. 3. Moral development-LongitudiDal studies. L 'DUe. [DNLM: 1. Women-Psychology. HQ 1206 G48Ul HQI206.G58 305.4'2 81-13478 ISBN 0-674-445~3-o (cloth) AACR2 ISBN 0-674-44544-9 (paper)
To my mother and my father
Contents Leffer to Readers, 1993 Acknowledgments
ix xxix
Introduction
1
1
Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle
S
2
Images of Relationship
24
3
Concepts of Self and Morality
64
4
Crisis and Transition
106
5
Women's Rights and Women's JUdgment
128
6
Visions of Maturity
151
References Index of Study Participants General Index
177
181 182
Letter to Readers, 1993 I began writing In a Different Voice in the early 1970s, at a time of resurgence in the Women's Movement. College students now are incredulous when I say that in the spring of 1970, at the height of the demonstrations against the Vietnam war, after the shooting of students at Kent State University by members of the National Guard, final exams were canceled at Harvard and there was no graduation. For a moment, the university came to a stop and the foundations of knowledge were opened for reexamination. In 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade made abortion legally available, the underpinnings of relationships between women and men and children were similarly exposed. When the highest court made it legal for a woman to speak for herself and awarded women the deciding voice in a complex matter of relationship which involved responsibility for life and for death, many women became aware of the strength of an internal voice which was interfering with their ability to speak. That internal or internalized voice told a woman that it would be "selfish" to bring her voice into relationships, that perhaps she did not know what she really wanted, or that her experience was not a reliable guide in thinking about what to do. Women often sensed that it was dangerous to say or even to know what they wanted or thought-upsetting to others and therefore carrying with it the threat of abandonment or retaliation. In