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Carol Gilligan (; born November 28, 1936) is an American feminism, ethicist, and psychologist best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships.
Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice (1982), which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.
In 1996, Time magazine listed her among America's 25 most influential people. She is considered the originator of the ethics of care.
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 where she wrote her doctoral dissertation "Responses to Temptation: An Analysis of Motives". Disillusioned by academia, Gilligan left academia to pursue a career in modern dance.
Gilligan eventually left Harvard in 2002 to join New York University as a full professor with the School of Education and the School of Law. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in the Centre for Gender Studies from 2003 until 2009.
Gilligan studied women's psychology and girls' development and co-authored or edited a number of texts with her students. She contributed the piece "Sisterhood Is Pleasurable: A Quiet Revolution in Psychology" to the 2003 anthology , edited by Robin Morgan. She published her first novel, Kyra, in 2008. In 2015, Gilligan taught for a semester at New York University in Abu Dhabi.
Gilligan proposed her theory of stages of female moral development based on her idea of moral voices. According to Gilligan, there are two kinds of moral voices: that of the masculine and the feminine. The masculine voice is "logical and individualistic", meaning that the emphasis in moral decisions is protecting the rights of people and making sure justice is upheld. The feminine voice places more emphasis on protecting interpersonal relationships and taking care of other people. This voice focuses on the "care perspective", which means focusing on the needs of the individual in order to make an ethical decision. For Gilligan, Kohlberg's stages of moral development were emphasizing the masculine voice, making it difficult to accurately gauge a woman's moral development because of this incongruity in voices. Gilligan argues that androgyny, or integrating the masculine and the feminine, is the best way to realize one's potential as a human. Gilligan's stages of female moral development has been shown in business settings as an explanation to the different ways men and women handle ethical issues in the workplace as well.
Gilligan developed her own stages of moral development with the idea that women make moral and ethical decision based on how they will affect others in mind. She followed Kohlberg's stages of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional morality, but she based these upon her research with women rather than men, a major advance in psychological theory. These three stages also have two transitions between the three steps of morality.
The first stage is pre-conventional morality. This stage revolves around self-interest and survival. When a conflict arises between the needs of oneself and the needs of others, a woman will choose her own needs first. Transition number one states that during this transition, a woman realizes her responsibility for others and that she could have previously been thinking selfishly. The second stage of three is conventional morality. This stage revolves around being selfless and prioritizing care for others. A woman realizes the needs of others and cares for them over herself, leading to self-sacrifice. After the second stage is the second of the two transitions. Transition two states that during the second transition, a woman realizes her needs are just as important as the needs of others. She realizes she must balance the needs of herself and the needs of others. This is a shift from "goodness" to "truth" as she honestly assesses the needs of each, not just as a responsibility. Finally, the third stage is post-conventional morality. This stage involves women paying attention to how their actions affect others, and taking responsibility for those consequences, good and bad. Women also take control of their own lives and show strong care for others. Here, a woman realizes the needs of herself are just as important as the needs of others, thus leading to the universal ethic of care and concern.
In a Different Voice by Gilligan goes deeper into her criticism of Kohlberg and the moral development stages of women, and was one of the accomplishments that put her at the forefront of the feminist movement.
Gilligan also makes commentary on how current theory did not apply as easily when looking at a woman's perspective. She uses Freud as her first example, as he relied on "the imagery of men's lives in charting the course of human growth." Yet in doing so, Freud struggled to apply his work to the experiences of women as well. Gilligan continues to target this absence of the feminist perspective by look at a scenario involving two adolescent children. By using Kohlberg's six stages of moral development, Gilligan attempts to analyze both the boy and girl's answers to the question of whether a man should steal medicine to save his wife. Gilligan realizes that the girl's responses seem to place her a whole stage lower in maturity than the boy. However, Gilligan argues that this is a result of the children seeing two different moral problems. The boy sees this as a problem of logic whereas the girl seems to see this as a problem of human relationships. Gilligan points out that Kohlberg's explanation gives reason for why the boy's perspective is more mature, but gives no reason why the girl's perspective may be just as mature in other ways, suggesting the Kohlberg's system does not apply to all. In conducting a second interview between two new participants of the opposite gender, she finds similar results where the girl sees the situation less in terms of logic, but more in terms of a web of human relationships. Gilligan concludes this section saying how Freud is not necessarily correct in saying that girls have an intensification of narcissism during puberty, but that they develop a deeper perspective of care and "a new responsiveness to the self".
Furthermore, Gilligan introduces In a Different Voice by explaining that "the different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but theme. Its association with women is an empirical observation, and is primarily through women's voices that I trace its development. But this association is not absolute and the contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus on a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex." Regardless of the findings Gilligan made from her study, her ethics of care and the fuel for her study have called future researchers to broaden the scope of studies and consider intersectionality more as well.
As of 2022, In a Different Voice had been translated into 20 different languages and sold over 700,000 copies.
In Marilyn N. Metzl's book review on The Birth of Pleasure, she says:
Gilligan's book traces love's path as she studies children's communication and couples in crisis, and argues persuasively that a child's inborn ability to love freely and live authentically becomes inhibited by patriarchal structure. Gilligan demonstrates how parents and Patriarchy culture reinforces the loss of voice in girls while simultaneously forcing and shaming sons into masculine behavior characterized by assertion and aggression. Girls or boys who challenge this system and assume the role of the opposite sex are severely punished by the culture.
Gilligan and Brown explore the heightened psychological risks of girls going through adolescence. By conducting a five-year study of girls, starting at age 12, Gilligan and Brown observe the psychological development of these girls. These problems have been seen as central to the psychology of women and their development.
This book includes the voices of girls in adolescence to further examine their ideas of self, relationship, and morality, which are all crucial to the psychology of human development. Each story helps illuminate the questions that arose during the research.
In Gilligan's previous book, In a Different Voice, Gilligan called the two different perspectives "gender specific". With her three colleagues in this book, they soften the term to "gender related". They say that each sex can answer moral dilemmas through the other gender's perspective.
In early fall of 2002, Gilligan released a theater adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, originally written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Gilligan's son, Jonathan Gilligan, worked on writing the play with her. The play first opened on September 14, 2002, at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. While most of the story's content remained the same, Gilligan used the play as a vehicle to present many of the concepts on which she had been working. She related how the patriarchy not only maintains strict gender roles, but also how it prevents true pleasure in relationships between people. Gilligan said that Hawthorne was demonstrating that "you could overthrow kings, and still the tension between puritanical society and love and passion would continue". In Gilligan's adaption, she suggested that we have inherited Pearl's world where women do not necessarily have to worry about having an "A" on their breasts.
Dennis M. Senchuk makes a different critique of Gilligan's work, saying she uses hypothetical dilemmas in her theory. Senchuk thinks that Gilligan is unwilling to agree to Kohlberg's ideas because she does not agree with the reasoning on males, resulting in the exaggeration of the differences between males and females. Senchuk also notes the similarities between Gilligan's theory and Schopenhauer's misogyny. He recommends that her theory should be "extended - by the imagination - beyond the here and now" and not be restricted to the current network of personal relationships.
The Gilligans raised three children: Jonathan, Timothy, and Christopher. Jonathan Gilligan is a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Jonathan has also collaborated with their mother, to write the play The Scarlet Letter (a feminist adaptation of Hawthorne's novel) and the libretto for the opera Pearl. Timothy Gilligan is the vice-chair for Education and associate professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute. Christopher Gilligan is the Associate Chief Medical Officer of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Director of the Brigham and Women's Spine Center.
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