Carol Gilligan
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Carol Gilligan (b. November 28, 1936) is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist best known for her work with and against Lawrence Kohlberg on ethical community and ethical relationships, and certain subject-object problems in ethics. She is currently a Professor at New York University and a Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge.
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[edit] Background
Carol Gilligan was born in New York City in 1936. She was the only child of a lawyer, William Friedman and a nursery school teacher, Mabel Caminez. Carol plays piano and pursued a career in modern dance during her graduate studies. Carol Gilligan received her B.A. summa cum laude in English literature from Swarthmore College, a master's degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. [1]
In 1960 she married James Gilligan, M.D., who directed the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School. He is the former Medical director of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane and was director of mental health for the Massachusetts prison system. They have three adult sons. She and her husband currently live in New York City and the Berkshires. [1][2]
[edit] Teaching career
She began her teaching career at Harvard University in 1967. She received full tenure with the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1986. She taught for two years at the University of Cambridge from 1992-1994 as a Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions. In 1997, she was the first to be appointed to the Patricia Albjerg Graham Chair in Gender Studies.[2]
Gilligan left Harvard in 2002 to join New York University as a full professor with the School of Education and the School of Law. [3] She is currently a visiting professor with the University of Cambridge (Centre for Gender Studies).[4]
[edit] Scholarship
Her landmark book, In A Different Voice (1982), is described by Harvard University Press as “the little book that started a revolution.” It has since been translated into 17 languages. Following In A Different Voice, she studied women’s psychology and girls’ development and co-authored or edited five books with her students Mapping the Moral Domain (1988), Making Connections (1990), Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance (1991), Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, (1992) – a New York Times notable book of the year, and Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationships (1995). She received a senior research scholarship award from the Spencer Foundation, a Grawemeyer Award for her contributions to education, a Heinz Award for her contributions to understanding the human condition and was named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential Americans. Following her research on girls’ development, she studied boys and their parents in relationships.
[edit] In a Different Voice
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Her fame rests primarily on In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982) in which she criticized Kohlberg's stages of moral development of children. This study argued that girls on average reached a lower level of moral development than boys did. Gilligan pointed out that the participants in Kohlberg's basic study were largely male, and that the scoring method Kohlberg used tended to favor a principled way of reasoning that was more common to boys, over a moral argumentation concentrating on relations, which would be more amenable to girls. Kohlberg saw reason to revise his scoring methods as a result of Gilligan's critique, after which boys and girls scored more evenly.
Her work formed the basis for what has become known as the ethics of care, a theory of ethics that contrasts ethics of care to so-called ethics of justice.
[edit] Criticism
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Christina Hoff Sommers, in her book The War Against Boys notes that the In a Different Voice studies did not follow standard research protocol. Gilligan used small samples, her findings were not peer reviewed, and decades later, Gilligan has continued to resist letting other researchers see her data.[citation needed]
Tufts University professor Zella Luria commented on the studies by saying, "One is left with the knowledge that there were some studies involving women and sometimes men and that women were somehow sampled and somehow interviewed on some issues.... Somehow the data were sifted and somehow yielded a clear impression that women could be powerfully characterized as caring and interrelated. This is an exceedingly intriguing proposal, but it is not yet substantiated as a research conclusion." Furthermore, her use of small samples invalidates the statistical meaningfulness of her findings, her hand-selection of persons to sample indicates potential sample bias, and her refusal to allow peer review or examination of her data makes her claims unverifiable. These issues make her conclusions essentially entirely untrustworthy within the academic community.[citation needed]
In her article "Power, Science and Resistance", the feminist writer and psychologist Naomi Weisstein - who considered Freud's conclusions to have been driven by his presuppositions rather than his research - argued that Gilligan's work merely emulates the sexist essentialism of 1960's psychology that sought to present women as irrational and child-like creatures. In her analysis, men had previously utilized the discourse of psychology to present their pre-formed sexist opinions about the female character as 'findings' through a similar method to that used by Gilligan. These 'findings' were then used to deter women from education and to bind them within the reproductive inner-space of the household. Although Gilligan sought to nuance her findings by claiming that the gender difference she constructed arises out of the socialization process rather than biology, Weisstein considers her work to reflect the same essentialist reasoning.[citation needed]
This supports the view that the popularity of the Ethics of Care thesis does not arise out of respect for its methodological rigour, but rather because it can be used to support a particular political worldview. Sara Ruddick drew upon Gilligan's hypothesis to support her belief that a female capacity for 'maternal thinking' could be harnessed as the foundation for a form of politics that is less conflictual and ultimately more benign than what she perceives as the present patriarchal structure. Critics believe that this serves to illustrate the intense political implications of placing characteristics within genders boundaries - no matter what caveats are then added - in the manner that Gilligan set out to do.
[edit] Works
- In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Harvard University Press, (1982)
- Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education, Harvard University Press, (1989)
- Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School, Harvard University Press, (1990)
- Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, Harvard University Press, (1992)
- Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationships, Harvard University Press, (1997)
- "The Birth of Pleasure", Knopf, (2002)
- "Kyra", Random House, (2008)
