While in Paris to celebrate the republication of the book she became world famous for, In a different voice, Carol Gilligan was thinking about the reactions to the book over time. Some reactions had been encouraging; others were based on misconceptions of the intention of her work, like the idea that she had provided the ground for a ‘war against boys’. (The latter is probably hinting to a book by Christina Hoff Sommers with that title.) Gilligan began writing that day to render her ‘current take on the major themes’ of her work, not only on the ethic of care, but also on the situation boys and men in addition to that of girls and women. After all, she is the parent of three boys together with her husband since youth, Jim Gilligan. So, she returns to the focus of both girls and boys throughout the book, but the main account is always that of girls and women.
Published in the year of her 75th birthday, this new book takes the form of an academic testament looking backward and forward. Still, it is hard to see this as her ‘last will’, for she seems too engaged for this to be her final say.
Carol Gilligan was recruited by Lawrence Kohlberg to his research team within cognitive moral development, but she left that realm around the time of publishing In a different voice in 1982. And indeed, this is where the story of this new book starts: ‘Revisiting In a different voice’. Many readers of JME might be interested in whether Gilligan, in this new book, writes about her work with Kohlberg and cognitive moral development, but she does not. The focus of this book is mostly on the other issues that sprang out of In a different voice like having voice, and a desire for change.
Gilligan shares some interesting self-biographical material, which enables us to better understand her development through the three main streams of her work: Gilligan as an activist, scholar and wife/mother. She shares how her husband’s work for a period frustrated her since he was obliged not to share things from his work with anyone, including her. She also refers to her own analysis ‘in the hands of my free-thinking analyst’ which helped her free herself from ways of learned, entrenched thinking to reasoning closer to reality as she sees it.
Gilligan’s account of her paradigmatic assumptions may not be the most important part of the book. It is rather introductory, without much reflective discussion. She refers to evolutionary anthropologist, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who has discovered that men in relatively early stages of evolution are presumed to show caring attitudes toward children. This is taken as a cornerstone of her argument that men today should live out that propensity and leave the patriarchal culture in which they have been socialized. It is easy to imagine that some could take her to task on a paradigmatic level, but that may not diminish her main argument of releasing humans from fencing social structures into a culture of love and caring as well as justice.
Gilligan may also expect reactions from people who may not want to buy into the idea that the traditional family has outplayed its role and that any caretaker from the outside could fully replace members of the nuclear family to a growing child, as she seems to argue at some length in her treatment on alloparenting.
Throughout the book, the activist Gilligan is arguing for change, transformation. This is clearly intentional as she explains how girls’ resistance in adolescence from dissociation from their honest voices inevitably becomes political in nature. She wants the change to happen through education, the non-violent option to revolution.
To many, Gilligan is mostly or best known for her academic work, and many might find two of her main case studies in this book interesting. She shows how Freud, after discovering the dissociation of women from their true selves through psychoanalysis, had to dissociate himself from that finding because of reactions from the psychological community. And her analysis of Anne Frank gives a profound account of the mechanisms of dissociation from one’s true self through the insightful material she left in her diary and other documents. It may well be worth reading the book for these two accounts alone.
Gilligan claims two fathers for her academic life, one from the psychoanalytic school, Erik H. Erikson, and one from the cognitive school, Lawrence Kohlberg. She does not tell who her academic mother might be. Many might find her claim to Kohlberg odd since she hardly writes about the important period of her adult life when she worked with him on the cognitive moral project. After all, In a different voice was very much about stages of cognitive moral development. That topic is left out in this book.
Carol Gilligan is a good writer, and she is honest. This book is recommended for all who want to better understand Gilligan’s view on how culture may blight a person’s relationship to one’s true self and how love and honesty may lead to a richer life.
© 2012, Gunnar Jorgensen