Gilligan, Carol

Carol Gilligan, an internationally acclaimed feminist psychologist, is a professor at New York University. She was born on November 28, 1936, in New York City, the daughter of William and Mabel Friedman. She attended Swarthmore College, graduating summa cum laude with a B.A. degree in 1958. In 1960, she earned an M.A. degree from Radcliffe College, and in 1964 was awarded a Ph.D. in clinical psychology by Harvard University. In 1986, she became one of the few women to be awarded tenure at Harvard, in the Graduate School of Education. Gilligan has drawn upon her knowledge of literature, clinical psychology, and social psychology to reshape the field of what is now called relational psychology. Her pathbreaking research on identity and moral development and the psychology of girls and women challenged traditional theories of developmental psychology, and has had a profound impact on educational practice. Gilligan's first book, In a Different Voice (1982), is considered a classic text in second-wave feminist theory for its critique of andocentric assumptions about human development. It has been translated into 15 languages.

Gilligan's scholarship divides into three phases. Each phase contributes to a new framework for understanding self and identity construction, relationships, and human development. In a Different Voice represents the first phase, where Gilligan reacted to existing research that was void of women and women's voices. The second phase of her research focused on girls and women in educational contexts that lead to the development of a voice-centered model of relational psychology. This work took form in the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls’ Development—a collaboration between Gilligan and numerous doctoral and postdoctoral students. The third phase is represented by The Birth of Pleasure, published in 2002, in which Gilligan focuses on relationships, specifically love, from a multidisciplinary perspective, including psychology, literature, and social-cultural analyses. In this same year, she debuted her first play, an adaptation of Hawthorn's classic love story, The Scarlet Letter.

Gilligan's place in psychology began with her challenge of Lawrence Kohlberg's and Erik Erikson's theories, which she argued cast women as falling short of men in terms of moral reasoning and the negotiation of identity and intimacy. She criticized Kohlberg's theory of development on three accounts. First, she called attention to the fact that Kohlberg's theory was derived from interviews solely with privileged white men and boys. She asked a question that became the hallmark of “woman-centered” analysis: What happens to psychological theories when women rather than men are the subjects of study? Second, she pioneered a new approach to the study of moral development. Rather than asking women to solve scripted moral dilemmas, Gilligan interviewed women making crucial, real-life, emotionally charged decisions about which they were torn (e.g., whether or not to have an abortion). She traced the complexities of how the women talked about making choices in situations when none of the choices were good. In these situations, the women expressed a tension between maintaining their relationships with others and attending to their own individual needs. Gilligan argued that the women's struggle defied conventional assessments of moral reasoning. Thus, in her third challenge to Kohlberg's account, she disputed his view that an individual's concern with individual rights and rules is a higher stage of moral thinking than is a concern with care and relationships.

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