Why? Radio episode "In A Different Voice and After" with guest Carol Gilligan

5:05PM Mar 20, 2024

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Carol Gilligan

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Hello, everybody, welcome to Why philosophical discussions about everyday life. I'm your host Jack Russell Weinstein. Today we're joined by psychologist feminist and philosopher Carol Gilligan to talk about her recent work and the influence and legacy of her groundbreaking book in a different voice. If you'd like to join the conversation, we'll take your calls and emails later on in the show. And if you'd like to chat with other listeners while we're live, follow the link in our chat room at WWW dot why radio show.org that's www dot why radio show.org When a different voice was published in 1982, I was 13 and a year away from moving out of my mother's house. She and I weren't getting along and I chose to live with my father. Instead, I had for most of my life spent the weekdays with her and the weekends with him, learning in the process to negotiate their radical personality differences. My mom was hyper feminine. My dad's super masculine and whoever's apartment I was in framed whom I could be or how I would act, their character traits. While extreme were not cliche. My dad had no interest in sports or fixing cars. My mom was neither affectionate nor obviously maternal. But my dad was obsessed with what it meant to be a man and my mom saw the world through a self consciously feminist lens. It was important to her to be acknowledged not just as a woman, but on her own terms. Given that I'd spent most of my life being one way or another different ways of speaking of asserting myself of drawing boundaries. I was right for Carol Gilligan central claim. Men and women are socialized not only to think differently, but to have equal but distinct moral logics. Philosophers and psychologists had always recognized that men and women came to different moral conclusions, but it was generally assumed that the male ways were correct, and that women's were deviations. They thought there was only one correct way to reason and since following Aristotle, being rational is the essence of being human. Only one type of thinking meant only one kind of humanity. Eve was made from Adam's Rib after all, Gilligan's work challenged this perspective, and it spoke to my experience, her assertion that the feminine was regularly silenced, echoed my mom's belief as well. My mother never knew the world to acknowledge her personhood, and she responded by standing her ground, reality must be made to vent to her she believed brute force was her only ally. Now famously, Carol Gilligan identified women as sharing an irrationality steeped in relationships that became known as Kerr male reasoning she observed involves rule following or what would be called justice. My parents didn't seem to match this picture. My mom is the most autonomous person I know. I learned to fight lost causes from her and to through sheer acts of will make them not so lost. My dad taught me to create the rules for myself and that opportunities come from relationships. I could not have made use of one set of lessons without the other. I move back in my mom three years after I left, I'd gotten really sick needed 24 hour care, and she was unemployed. One night I had a bad reaction to medication and my skeletal body racked with what seemed to be a heart attack. My poor mom, two female Paramedics rushed into the apartment to assist it was the 1980s and mom and I still refer to them as Cagney and Lacey. And they remain two of the most competent people I've ever met. I was back in the world of women. 30 years ago, I would not have been able to talk to you like this. There were a few biographical narratives in philosophy before feminism forced them in feminism's first insight is that gender is an important analytic category that we learn a lot from asking about the female experience. But as with any social science, the temptation arises to see all women as identical or to see all men as synonyms for one another. Feminism responds by recognizing the personal that deep insights come from stories like mine. The desire to respect the individual should not stop us from thinking about gender. My mother always thought in terms of care, she wanted validation from her community more than just about anything. My father always thought in terms of justice, he believed he deserved success that it was rightly his. The question before us now is whether we are fitting people into a mold or whether we are finally paying attention to women as women. I learned to hear the female voice growing up in my mother's house, but life is complicated, and I only learned to understand it after I was given the freedom to walk away. And now we turn to our guests Carol Gilligan, university professor at New York University, and the former holder of the first chair of gender studies at Harvard University. She's the author of many books, among them the birth of pleasure mapping the moral domain and the forthcoming joining the resistance, but she is most well known for the tremendously influential study of human moral reasoning I mentioned in a different voice First published in 1982, the book is still in print still being translated into new languages. And like its author, still a voice that must be attended to Carol, and I'm immensely happy to hear myself say this. Welcome to Why thank you. Thank

you. I'm just delighted to be here.

We'd love to have our listeners join the conversation will start taking calls and questions shortly, call us at 888-755-6377 that's 888-755-6377 and email us at ask why@umd.edu That's asked why@umd.edu. Of course, you can always chat with other listeners at why Radio show.org. So, Carol, you wrote this book. And it was a tremendous success, to say the least. But the world is somewhat different now than it was then. What did the world look like before in a different voice? What was the what was happening in academia and politics in your mind as this was incubating?

Well, it goes back. The world in the world in which I wrote this book was a world in which it was assumed that if you wanted to write about humans, do you listen to men, you studied men psychologist, but that wasn't even known or acknowledged. I mean, in the university world, there were very few women on the faculty. And the, I think the most astonishing thing, Jack is that really, nobody noticed this. Or if they noticed, they didn't see it as a problem. It's just seemed like the way things are. So I was at the time, this is now the 1970s. This is the time of the women's movement. So these issues were coming into consciousness. And I was teaching part time I was teaching with Eric Erickson at Harvard and with Lawrence Kohlberg. And I remember having, I was the mother of three young children at the time. And I remember when I was teaching, child development, I was trying to listen to like Erickson, or Piaget to learn how you're supposed to talk about it. Because I did know that if I spoke from my own experience, I would get it wrong. So there was there was a psychology that was that was being taught. And there was an accident at that time in history, which is how my book came into being, which is, I thought you couldn't study moral development where you couldn't understand how people thought about morality or even about themselves. By asking them hypothetical questions, what should some person do in some hypothetical situation? Because it's easy to say what somebody should do. But it's a very different thing if you're in that situation, and you have to live with the consequences. So I started to do a study of how people think about actual moral choices that they will actually face. And I was studying Harvard students who were going to face the Vietnam draft, and I thought, what will they do? You know, will they resist the draft? Will they go to Vietnam? And in the middle, as I was sort of getting my study started, President Nixon ended the draft. And then this was 1973. The Supreme Court in Roe v Wade, rule that, you know, that legalized abortion. So there was another choice that people made that had moral implications. And so I switched my study, and I began to interview pregnant people who were thinking about whether to continue or abort her pregnancy. And I was completely blind to gender. I mean, that was not at all on my, my thought gender was about Latin vocabulary. And it's really true. But what started as a study of men be turned into a study of women. And as I listened to women talking about themselves and about, you know, where morality what they saw as the moral issues involved. I realized I suddenly I remember my friend, Dora came in. And I said, I understand your you know, why women why psychologists don't understand women because the some of the women are, were framing the problem differently. And she said to me, I remember that day she said to me, that's interesting, you should write about it. And that's the origin of in a different voice.

You know, what's what's astonishing about that story? I mean, in addition to the obvious moment in history when everything is happening all at once is As we don't think of talking, we think of talking about gender as obvious. We think of it as a fact of the world now, whether people are comfortable with it or not as a different issue, and yet, it was complete, exact opposite, it was invisible to you. And it had to you had to have a different framework to do that. And the framework that brought you to that point, was the moment when you had to ask about real morality, not about theoretical morality, because of course, gender is real. It's not just theory.

That's right, then then, you know, after that, then I realized something that took me completely by surprise, which is that the psychology I had been teaching was deeply gendered, because it was based on an assumption that men represented humans. So psychologists would study boys or study men, and then they would generalize to humans. And in some ways, it was amazing, because, you know, it's, it's, it's such an obvious error. And the question is, I hadn't seen it, no one had seen it. And that's what really interested me how come men were speaking, as if you could leave out women and miss nothing. And women, were excusing the omission of ourselves as if somehow it was okay, you know, to write a book call, for example, the seasons of a man's life stages of adult development.

And let's take a second, and I want to revisit something you said in passing, that they would interview some boys, and generalize from humanity, or generalized Oh, yeah,

general, when they build a theory. And then you could take that theory, and you could measure girls, or women. And what you're asking basically, is how much like men do women think? Because the categories were set on the studies of men. And so if women, if women differed, and you can extend this Paul to people of color, or people from different countries, or if women different from men, then they were seen as basically, deviant or different meant deviant in development, they were seen as less developed, insofar as they were not like men. So what my work did was to look at the theory and say, Wait a minute, what if you include women? And then what kind of a theory do you have of morality or identity or whatever? Okay,

so you asked this question, and you start to interview these women whose own experience makes the bias of psychology just completely evident to you. You run off and write a book, right? I do. But there's a stage. Right? There's, you wrote this article, this this, I

wrote it? Well, first, the first thing I did is I wrote an article I was, I mean, you know, I would love to, for your listeners to recapture that moment. Because this took me completely by surprise. And I wrote about it to try to sort it out for myself, I'd had no idea that anyone else would be interested. And I want to say, you know, because this is a key point, that when I was interested, when I was actually teaching a section of Colbert's class, I had noticed that the men in the class when it came to talk, they would talk about the justice or the injustice of the Vietnam War. And but when it came to the subject of the draft, which many of them would actually be pacing, they suddenly fell silent. And I became interested in that silence. And I realized it's because when it was a real decision that they were going to live with, they were thinking not only about, you know, questions of justice in the abstract, but also how their actions would affect relationships and emotions. And they knew if they said that they would sound like women and be scored at a lower level on Kullberg scale, so they didn't want to talk about it. So women were calling attention to something that was not just a problem of women, it was that this theory was silencing in an odd way, both men and women. So I wrote this article called in a different voice, which was bringing women's voices into what was called the human conversation. And my question was, if you bring women's voices into the human conversation, it changes the voice of that conversation, because women give are more likely to give voice to aspects of human experience, which were not spoken about your scene. So I wrote this article called, I wrote it for myself, in a different voice, women's conceptions of self and morality. And I it circulated it had an underground kind of circulation, people passed it around like some is that. And then there was a student of mine. And he was on the editorial board of the student run Harvard egg review. And he said, Can I take it to the Harvard Ed review? And I said, Sure. So he takes it to the Harvard Ed review. And they turned it down. I love to tell the story to my students, they don't believe that a book that, you know, became so widely read was, they said, We don't know what this is. So that got my backup. And I thought, you don't know what this is. And so I added headings. And they did say revise and resubmit, they just said, if you want to, you know that we'll look at it again. So I sent it back to them that time they accepted it. And then we had a fight over style, because they said it wasn't written in social science style. And I said, Well, it's called in a different voice. You know, you can't write Faulkner's novels in Hemingway's prose. And so it got published. And then it became a citation classic, which is means in article was that time most cited articles, so I had no idea when I wrote that. And then it turned, it became Chapter Three of the book, but I thought I was working out a problem. That was my problem, which is why I felt I couldn't say what I really felt in thought I had to learn how to say, you know how to speak if I wanted to be a judge developed or whatever?

Well, you know that that reaction is such a microcosm of the ways that women with feminist interests become the subject of the debate. It's, it's not the world's problem. It's your problem. It's you have to work this out, instead of looking at the world and saying, Well, wait a minute, maybe it's the structures that are problematic. Maybe it's the research that's problematic. If you're invisible. If you're not connected to these, then it's not you that the problem is, well,

you know, I structured my book around a syllogism, which is if women's voices differ from the voice of psychological theories, the problem and women are the problem in the theory, that I'm exactly what you just said. So so let's let's

take a look at what this difference that you found means with either either the woman talking about abortions or the famous example of of the pharmacist, the pharmacy and the man who is asked whether he wants to whether he should steal, medicine, you always

yes. One of the hypothetical dilemmas, Colbert's dilemma, the Heinz dilemma, Heinz, his wife is dying of her cancer. And there's an overpriced drug that would save her life. And then the question is, should he steal the drug to save her life? That's the question.

And how did men tend to answer this? And how did women? Well,

you know, I have to say, my, I didn't do a statistical study. I never compared men as a group to women as a group, but the right answer was to weigh the value of life and the value against the value of property right to life versus right to property, which right takes precedence. So that was the reasoning about it. And in my book, I cry, quote, this 11 year old girl, this I have these 211 year olds in my book called Amy and Jake, and Amy says should hide steal the drug. And she says, it basically. You know, he shouldn't steal, but the wife shouldn't die either. You know, he should come to the drugs and they should talk about it. There must be a better way to solve this problem. And then she plays it out. If he stole the drug, he might save his wife's life then, but she might get sicker again. And he might be in jail. So it might make things actually worse. So they should find some other way to make the money or get the drug. Now, that was described, you know by Kohlberg is wishy washy as evasive. But the interesting thing and this is why I wrote about it was fascinating. She wasn't answering the question that the interviewer thought she was asking, the interviewer was asking, should hide steal the drug with would it be right or wrong? And Amy was answering the question, should Heinz steal the drug was stealing the best thing to do in this situation? And her answer was, there are better ways than Stillings to solve this problem.

And so then you start to develop this notion that there's this relational moral rationality this this this way of thinking about moral dilemmas, in terms of the community in terms of caring for one another. In terms of developing the future relationships, especially with kids and playgrounds and stuff like that, as opposed to this, this this more rule following notion, you said you didn't. You didn't study men versus women. So how did it become a male versus female? Feminist issue? Not that feminism means male versus female, necessarily, but how did it become framed in the way that it is understood to be framed? Well,

it's psychological theory had been based on studies of men. And the subtitle of my book was psychological theory and women's development. And I was contrasting women's voices with the voice of psychological theory. And I said, difference, the big difference in the different voice is that it in moral theory, for example, there's this very clear split between reason and emotion, and between self and relationships are between mind and body. And women were joining reason and emotion, self and relationship, mind and body, they were starting from a premise of connectedness that were our lives are connected. And it just completely reframed how you thought about what was a moral problem and how you responded to moral dilemmas.

So the radical element of the book is not this way that it's often framed, which is, women are superior to men or carrying a spirit to justice, but rather, just the fact that you considered women as valid subjects in the first place, is what?

That's what was shocking, that to say, to listen to women, I mean, Harvard press, he described this as the little book that started a revolution. And what they the description said, it's the first book in the social sciences, that listen to women's voices in their own right and on their own terms. So it wasn't the company, it said, Here is a different voice. And it's had hears a voice worth listening to, because it has something profound to say about the human condition.

And you said to me on the phone, when we were preparing for this interview, that, that you're a writer first and that if you wanted to call it in a woman's voice, you would have

I would if I was writing a book about women's voices, I would have called it in a woman's voice. And the interesting thing is that there was like a silence in the human conversation that was being maintained, in a sense by women not saying what they really felt in thought I asked a woman when I was interviewing early on, about this dilemma about should this man steal the drug to save his wife's life? And she looked at me, and she said, Would you like to know what I think? Or would you like to know what I really think? And that was the clue that women had learned to think in a way they differed from how they really thought. And I was very interested then in why women weren't saying what they really felt in thought and also about the silences among men, because men are also concerned about emotions and relationships. Those are not just women's issues. When we

come back from the break, I want to talk about the difficulties that we have talking about gender, and the reaction to the book and how it got framed in a way that seems inauthentic to your vision. For those folks who would like to participate, give us a call at 888-755-6377 that's 888-755-6377 or send us an email at ask why@umd.edu And we'll be right back with why philosophical discussions about everyday life and Carol Gilligan after this.

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You're back listening to Wi Fi. softball discussions about everyday life. I'm your host, Jack Russell Weinstein, we're talking to Carol Gilligan, psychologist, feminist philosopher, and about the impact on her book in a different voice and the work that she's done since then if you'd like to participate in the conversation, give us a call at 888-755-6377. That's 888-755-6377. The other day, I had gone to the gym with my wife, we go to the student gym, at our university, and you have to show your ID to get in. And she takes out her ID and I take out my ID. And I'm shocked, because her idea is ideas crisp and clean. And the image is what it was 10 years ago when we moved here, and my ID is ratty and hard to see. And I said to her, how is it that your ID is in so much better shape than mine? And she looked at me, she said, Well, boys are disgusting. And, and I responded to her. And I said, you know, so So you study gender, for a living to you. And we laughed. And this was pretty much the closest we ever get take Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. But it it does connect to this notion that I've had that other people have, they're sort of a boy clean and a girl clean. And there's a radical difference between the two. And a lot of this comes from the kind of framework that in a different voice sets up and then that other feminist writers, and that includes male writers as well as female writers use in order to discuss differences in gender. And so the question I have initially is, is this the way that you want people to think about your analysis in terms of these competing, or different groups? And then I want to talk a little bit after that, about the difficulties that our culture has in addressing this as a large scale issue. So first, are you comfortable with this kind of language? Are you comfortable with men do this women do that Mars Venus sort of thing?

No, I'm really not. And increase the I mean, in the work since in a different voice and increasingly uncomfortable with it. By the way, as I said to you, what I discovered by by doing my research by this accident of history that I started listening to women is that psychologists were not listening to women and I could add or two people of color or to anyone who they thought of as different when they were framing their theories, I mean, men were seen as representative of humans and masculine masculine qualities, like rationality, were privileged above those qualities that were seen as feminine. And so what my work did was, say the voice of psychology was not an objective voice. It was a gendered voice, but the gender wasn't being talked about. And when you gave that example, I thought, you know, I don't know, if you grew up, but I certainly grew up with the, you know, little girls are like sugar and spice and everything nice and little boys are snails and tails, and God knows what. And, you know, the question I have is who's invested in these gender binaries, and gender hierarchies. And by those words, I mean, we're to be a boy means to be not a girl or not like a girl or to be a man means to be a man means to be not a woman. And then the hierarchy that to be a man means to be on top. And you know, that that binary and hierarchy are the building blocks the DNA, if you like, of patriarchy, which is an order of living based on gender. And what my book said was, women are humans, if you're gonna study humans, you can't leave out women were 50% of the humans. And that the description of humans that was being maintained by basically not including women, was also a distortion of who men are as humans, because for example, to say that men are rational and women are emotional, which is the Mars Venus kind of thing. It's absurd. I mean, men have feelings women think it. So the question is, who's invested in these gender stereotypes? What my book said is if you're going to study humans, then let's study humans and women are half the population every generation.

When my daughter was born about five years ago, She's our only child and we were out. She was a week or so old, and we were out looking for a carpet for her room and she's still in the baby carrier and I put her on on the counter and the woman who's working the store comes out up and look the baby and says congratulations. And we start talking about the fact that Edina is a girl. And she says, with this, I couldn't tell if it was disappointment or exasperation, or what and she said, her girl, that's really complicated. I have three boys. And as long as they're well fed, and have and have a place to run around, they're fine. They're like cattle. And it was, it was shocking to me, because of course, being a new father and I hadn't experienced this, this sense that has been ever present since the moment she was born, which is, girls are complicated. And boys are simple. And yet, I was supposed to be disappointed, because I had a girl, because you had a complicated, because I had a complicated

you know what I think? It's interesting, because I think why girls are seen as complicated is that they read the human world was such a student, this I mean, they really read the psychological world around them. I had a girl in one of my studies, and she was talking about how the fight at the dinner table that was provoked by her eight year old sisters refusal to eat the carrots, as she said, wasn't about the carrots. So if you've got someone in your house that's observing like that, or, for example, an 11 year old girl from public school, who was also one of my studies we were talking about, is it ever good to tell a lie. And this little 11 year old said, my house is wallpapered with lies. That's so the girls are reading the human world and and if the boys are watching hockey on TV, that may seem simpler than having a you know, that kind of commentary going on. But it's a real mistake to think that boys aren't picking up the human world in with equal acuity. So for example, a five year old boy says to his mother, Mummy, why do you smile when you're sad? That's interesting.

It's very interesting that you added that fit, because I was going to ask, you know, there are people who will hear what you just said about girls being so attentive, and hear you say, boys are not smart boys are not paying attention. But it's not

true. It's just not true. It's just not true. There's another little boy, four year old says to his mother, Mommy, why are you sad? And she said, because she thought she shouldn't burden him with her sadness. She said, I'm not sad, you know, in this high voice. And he said, Mommy, I know you, I was inside you. So, you know, if that's the ground on which we're going to talk about morality, you know, then we have a very different conversation, that this is the as humans, you know, we are very we're very tuned into the human world. And the question is not how do we gain the capacity to care, but rather, how do we lose that capacity? And that's a question for everybody.

What's shocking about this conversation is you and I, and all of our listeners know how hard it is to talk about gender and even even even my wife and I went when when we have arguments, the worst arguments are the arguments that that touch upon gender issues. And we work so hard to communicate, and we have a very good marriage, but these things, impair conversation, yet you go to the bookstore, you look at the internet, and there's magazines labeled women's interests, there are shows for women, there's Lifetime Television, which my wife calls television for terrified women. And there's all these things that are that are identified by gender, the media, the marketing, folks, they have absolutely no trouble categorizing, gender, race, age, class, ethnicity, religion, all of these are parts of their tools but in academia, and in personal life, this stuff is the hardest stuff. Why is that? Why is a marketing tool so difficult when it's not? Marketing?

Well, you know, if men are raised to think that being a man means not being like a woman immune why the worst things you can call little boys as you can call them a girl, a boy who doesn't act like a real boy is called a girl or gay or mama's boy or whatever. Then masculinity becomes aligned with this split between what's manly is has to be different from you know, what are women's interests, so anything that's defined as, as women's in becomes a province separate from men. I think the academic world, I think it's, it's, it's it's so important to use gender as a category of analysis, because it's a very powerful lens for seeing what's going on. I mean, that's where we go back to the beginning. I mean, the psychology that I was teaching was deeply gendered, but it wasn't recognized as such. And I think that's the issue that the academic world has been really struggling with. And my book was part of it. And once you see that you can't keep doing it in the same way. But I think gender issues are fraught, because they're not just academic issues, just like you said, it's, it's everybody's life, it's your family is your mother or your father, your sister. And so it comes very close to home. And to say, if you say men are different from women, or women are different for men, the next question is who's better? And then you have a real argument. But the whole argument to my mind is miscast. And that was what that's really what I've been writing about the study. So

a different voice is incredibly successful, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of reprinting edition in 1993. And I know you were recently in France for the new French edition, many, many languages, and you'd write some other things. And one of the things you talk about in a book called The Birth of pleasure, is the role of pleasure and tragedy in the human life and the filter that psychology and these sorts of questions puts on human life. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Well, after I have written in a different voice, and then I did this research on following girls development, just to bring if you're going to talk about child and adolescent development in 1980, the handbook of adolescent psychology came out. And the editor Joseph Abelson said, girls had not been studied. And so I had done this study. And I really came to a very new understanding of development and that children are resisting the loss, I would say, the loss of their moral grounding the loss of relationship. And that the I was interested not only in psychology, but generally, just why are we so? Why are we so drawn to tragic stories like tragic love stories? Why do we keep telling these stories over and over again? And why are the stories of civilization that we tell Abraham and Isaac Jeptha and his daughter Agamemnon and effigy Denia have this you know, this sacrifice these trauma stories? Are the foundational stories or the story of Oedipus? You know, whose parents tried to leave him on a hillside to die? Why are we so bound to tragic stories, and I said, because we're telling the story of trauma, which we are repeating, and it's relevant to your whole discussion of philosophy and ethics, because it's trauma that really interrupts our moral sensibility and diminishes it. So I wrote a book called The Birth of pleasure to say, instead of writing about the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche or Sophocles, the all these tragedies, let's look at the resistance to to repeating a tragic story. And so I, I wrote about the myth of psyche and arrows are Cupid, who become the who resist a tragic story and become the parents of a daughter named pleasure. So my point was the importance now at this point in history of telling a new story, and one that's more in touch with what we've come to know about who we are as humans and what is our humanity.

And this retelling of the story from in a different voice, the article onward is in your mind an act of resistance and it describes individual acts of resistance that you have encountered in your studies, thus, your your upcoming book, which I had the good fortune to read, which is a very, very much a memoir as well as a discussion of your perspective on these things is called joining the resistance what is the resistance and what are people resisting?

You know, we talk about resistance about people. The healthy body, a healthy body resists disease, you know, is your resistance high enough, you can resist the flu this winter. A healthy psyche resist disease, and as healthy psyche, resists an initiation that's driven by gender. So that we're being where human qualities are split into the masculine and the feminine, you know, like those magazines you were told Talking about. And as humans, we resist the loss of our humanity. So men resist a loss of a capacity to feel or a capacity to care girls resist. girls growing up resists pressures to silence and honest voice that is to not say what they're really feeling and thinking. And so I saw this resistance in children, as associated with psychological resilience that is signs of psychological health. So I thought, if we join children's healthy resistance to losses that will compromise their psychological functioning, that will really dim their moral intelligence, and compromise our capacity to live as a democratic society, that is a society where everyone's voice is listened to and heard with care and respect. If we resist these losses, we won't repeat these tragic stories and tragic patterns. And that seemed to me at this moment very urgent.

I want to revisit in a moment, this connection between the stuff you're doing and politics but before that we have, excuse me a phone call from Jen in Minot, North Dakota. Jan, are you there? I am. Welcome to why

I'm very glad to be here. I enjoy the program enormously. I cannot wait to read the books that Carol is written. My question has to do with the I have two questions. Do you see any difference in the attitudes today with people who are 20 and younger? The second question is, how does your book relate to? Or can you speak to the issue of bullying? Bullying is so profoundly affecting kids these days in schools? In the public venue on the Facebook pages, social work social pages. I'll stop No,

no, there's a wonderful questions. Let me try to the 20. And younger. I mean, I, I see a couple of things. The young women I see now have really benefited from the, you know, the, the work of you know, from the more the fact of people listening to women, and they they are more likely to their, to all the gains that have been made since the women's movement. I mean, they have a larger range of aspiration. At the same time, they're living still in a world where whatever is gendered masculine, is valued more than whatever is gendered feminine. And so now that they have access more to, you know, they can go into all kinds of occupations and go to schools that they couldn't go to before they're taking advantage of these opportunities. I think this is very hopeful, because the question is, you know, will they by entering places that women haven't been? Well, they change these worlds, it's a potentially very creative moment that you talk about, don't you

see them as being even more sexualized?

Well, that's that I would see as the backlash. Okay, that's the backlash. And I'm, I mean, as you know, I look at clothing for little girls. And it's shocking to me how the sexualization gets younger and younger. And if you honestly want to shut girls up, you'll sexualize them and objectify them at younger and younger ages. And as for the bullying, I mean, where the bullying comes in is around the initiation if I can use that word into what it means to being a boy. And I, you know, I'm always amazed or when girls and so the bullying starts with boys around five, six and seven were boys who are not look don't conform to what real boys are supposed to be are called gays or girls or whatever, and they're beaten up. And then for girls, the initiation into these gendered codes and scripts, really these patriarchal gender codes and scripts happens at adolescence. And then the inclusion and exclusion among girls can be very brutal. My question is always, where are the adults in this? You know,

that the bullying issue has been has come to a head more or less in North Dakota in that there have been several bills introduced or at least one that I'm familiar with, about bullying. And some of the opposition to it is just bizarre and maybe you can talk about that. I'll, with Jack later. I don't think there's enough time to talk about that at the moment. But bullying is a is a severe issue and people don't want to recognize it.

The thing is, if you look at what the issue the bullying is around his who is and who isn't like a real boy, or who isn't, and isn't included among the girls, it's around these policing of these patriarchal gender norms and values. And we're a democratic society. And so you're really looking at a struggle between patriarchy and democracy and democratic values, as opposed to gender, you know, codes and scripts that are not the one.

Jan, thank you so much for your call. It's an interesting transition. We're just about out of time. But but in joining the resistance, you have this comment within a patriarchal framework cares, a feminist ethic within a democratic framework cares, a human ethic. And so when we talk about democracy and politics, the stuff that you're talking about, is really about bringing out the humanity and the politics, not just the gender divide in psychology, it's your your, your goals are much larger.

Now, exactly. I mean, I started to write when I realized there was a gender divide in psychology in the sense that men were listened to and women were not. And I'm interested in, I said, within a patriarchal framework here is a feminine ethic. It's what it's associated with women and people who do caring work are seen as doing women's work. But I'm saying care is really a human ethic. It's a universal ethic. And that is what I'm about. Yeah.

So we're talking about politics. And one of the things that happens with your book and with you as a person in general, is you become an icon for the feminist movement. And your book becomes this core text that gets brandished around both in the most positive and the most negative ways. How does the activism relate to the academic pursuits? And how does the fame influence both what you can say and what you can't say and your effectiveness at doing either?

Well, the activism, I mean, the key point, the the feminist point, I'd love to throw in, by the way, my definition of feminism, please, which is that I don't see feminism as an issue of women or men or a battle between women and men, or women versus men. I think feminism is one of the great liberation movements in human history. It's the movement to free democracy from patriarchy. So that, to me is in the interest of both women and men because I think patriarchy makes both women and men, half humans.

So can you define for our listeners, your understanding of patriarchy,

patriarchy is very simply. It's a term from anthropology and it means a family or a society or religion. It it means a hierarchy. The word patriarchy means a hierarchy where the high roast the priest is a potter a father. So it's a family or religion or culture, where authority, power and authority descend from a father or fathers. And what it does is it elevates some men over other men, it separates the men from the boys and all men over women, but in dividing human qualities into the masculine and the feminine, and separating fathers from mothers and daughters and sons. It divides everyone from parts of themselves, it creates a rift in the psyche. And that's what I've basically written about. So the difference that the tie in I mean, why my work crosses the line, and certainly my life too, between activism and the academic world, is it's about women having voices. And that was a radical move in the academic world. And in the political world, starting in the 1980s, a gender gap appeared in voting, it was the first time since suffrage which was 1920. In the 1980s, a gender gap started to appear for the first time since suffrage women were not simply doubling their husbands vote, you know, saying, Oh dear, whatever, you're the one who knows about politics, that's a man's world. So tell me who to vote for or fathers. And in the 1990s, for the first time since suffrage women's votes in this country, elected the president in 2000, in the contest of 2011 Shouldn't there was the greatest gap between men's and women's votes that had ever been recorded with a 10 point difference. More men voting for Bush and more women voting for gore. So no, Jack, at this point, the politicians said we've had enough of a different voice, or at least the Republican politicians. And that's why in one way, this work became very contentious. On one hand, it's fundamental democracy, which is everyone has a voice that deserves to be listened to and heard with respect. That's what democracy means. And on the other hand, if women's voices, women are, you know, this is in the society, it's a majority, and if women are voting on the basis of what they know, through experience to be true, and it's different, then that's going to be a political hot potato. So my work, you know, then gets attacked. Well,

so so and we'll definitely come back to the activism question, but, but if, if this largest, okay, so there's this large divide between female voters and male voters, we're not large, I mean, the largest, I guess, you should say,

2000. And then after two to three, then after 911, it disappears. Okay, so

then I'm going to ask a naive question. And I know it's framed problematically, but I'm not quite sure at this moment, how else to ask, which is, Why are men collectively unable to see what's good for women? Collectively? What's going on there that men are so blind to these people who in most instances just are important to the other? Yeah, I mean, we're all important to each

other. No, that's that's a great question. But it's a complicated question. And the reason it's complicated, is, I think many, many men, you know, wish the best for the women who they love and care about their mothers, their daughters. In fact, when I did my work on girls, and I wrote about girls resisting the loss of an honest voice, and fathers rushed out to me said, I don't ever want her to lose that I love, you know, being with my daughter, because it's so alive. And she is so terrific. I don't ever want her to lose that. So I don't think it's something that men want. But when the the men, women dynamic starts, if women start feeling that in order, that, that there are so many pressures on girls as they grow up to, you know, to not save what they do not say what they see or listen to what they hear. And the good woman is said to be selfless, she responds to everybody else's voices. Except not her own. I'll tell you, just an I, when I was interviewing women, when I was doing my study of pregnant women, I would hear women call whatever they wanted to do have an abortion or half the baby selfish, because they wanted to do it. And to speak about doing what other people wanted them to do is good. And I remember one woman, Nina said to me, she was going to have an abortion because her boyfriend wanted to finish law school, and he was counting on her support. And I said, Yes. And what do you want to do? And she looked at me, and she said, What's wrong with doing something for someone you love? And I said nothing. But, and I repeated my question, what do you want to do? And after several iterations of that conversation, I started asking women, if it's good to be responsive to people, and you know, attentive to their needs and concerns, why is it selfish to respond to yourself? And woman after woman said to me, good question. So if women aren't speaking about what they see, or hear or observe, or want, or are concerned about, and men are talking, and men are speaking for women, then nobody's listening to women, and a whole voice goes out of the conversation. And that's how I think that dynamic happens. I don't think it's malicious.

And you've remarked to me before that, that one of the things that you feel you brought to the study of psychology was the ability to listen that this this was a particular talent, you had a background in music and literature. Could you talk a little bit about that listening and how it changes the dynamic of the research?

Absolutely. And in fact, with my students at Harvard, we developed a method of research that's called the listening guide method, which is, how do you listen, when you're trying to hear the psychological logic of what's being said, you know, not necessarily the formal logic or philosophical logic, but what's going on. So That's, that's where my work started, which is, I do have a background in music literature. And instead of asking how can I fit people, men or women into this or that category, I started listening to how people spoke about that speak about themselves. And about morality, what are the stories that people tell about their lives, and I saw there was a gap between the voice of theory, philosophy, psychology, you know, law, you name it, and the voices of people on the ground. And I, I written in my current book joining the resistance, that, you know, I realized the extent to which we meaning both men and women, were telling a false story about ourselves. I mean, a story that was at odds with the new discoveries in the human sciences about who we are as humans. And that, that was riveting to me, and I felt it was really important to write about that. And that's not just the psychology work. It's neurobiology, and evolutionary anthropology. I mean, there's a whole flood of new information coming from the human sciences. And it just look at all the books coming out with the words cooperation and empathy in the title. In

fact, we got an email question from Lauren in Washington, DC, where she points to some cognitive science research that suggests that the brain that the brain is seen as contributing to an ethics of care by defining care in terms of not harming others, and she wants to know a Do you think that the feminist approach could complicate this, this this notion more and she means complication in a positive sense, but also she's asking, to what extent do you think the brain is a component in caring and this ethics of care? And the psychology? I think

it's No, I totally think it is. And, you know, I'm interested in that are, we're neurologically hardwired to connect reason and emotion are our brains pick up we have mirror neurons, we we are, as humans, we are inherently empathic and capable of of cooperating with others, there's a study that shows that our brains light up more brightly when we choose cooperative over competitive strategies in the same areas of the brain that are lit up by chocolates. So you know, in a sense, what's happened is the portrayal of humans is aggressive and competitive. It's not that people can't be aggressive and competitive by nature, we are empathic and cooperative, cooperative beings, born, you know, neurologically hard, hard wired, to live in relationship with others. And in fact, that was key to the survival of our species. I'm capable of what the anthropologist Sarah hurty calls mutual understanding, is part of our evolutionary history. And, you know, I think arguably right now key to our survival as a species in the world we live in now. So that's very fundamental to an ethics of care. And if you're in touch, if you're in connection with others, and you're, you know, registering their feelings, then it becomes much harder to hurt them, than if you are have are shut off from them. And, you know, you don't care about them. And it was interesting, because in my studies of development, I would hear girls come to adolescence and start to say, I don't know, I don't know, as if the word don't was an injunction against knowing. And then you in Niobe way, who has a new book on boys called deep secrets, she would hear boys start to say, I don't care. But the fact is, girls do know, and boys do care. And that's the point that both girls and boys are men and women are humans. And as humans, we do know, we can know our experience. And we have a capacity to care. And that's what the ethics appears about.

It's interesting story popped up in my head, I was living in Vienna, Austria, which I did for a while, and I was dating someone, and we were having just this silly conversation, and she was asking whether or not she could open the window. And this was in German. And I said, the sort of the German equivalent of I don't care. In, in German, where I should have said, in German, it's all equal. And when I said I don't care if she got offended, she got really upset because she thought I was saying, you know, I don't care about you, I don't care what you're saying. Instead of saying, you know, it's it's all the same to me that that phrase I don't care can be so loaded and and so problematic in the ways that it can be interpreted it can be interpreted as whatever you want is fine, or your voice isn't important to me.

Right, right. And then I mean, then the question isn't exactly, exactly.

So, please Sorry,

I was just going to say the the really the good news about all this is as we are born with a capacity to care, I mean babies, if they hear another baby crying, they look distressed and everything else and it goes on through childhood. So the question is really not how do we gain the capacity to care? But how do we lose that capacity? I mean, we don't start from a place of, you know, just being locked up in our own selves, and only then come into relationship, we start from a place of relationship. And so the a lot of the philosophical questions shift at that point,

do you think that the shift away from an empathetic model is I know, this is unpacking a hole? This is a Pandora's box. But is it cultural, in the sense that our cultural structures have made us move away from our natural condition of caring? Or do you think that there's something about growing to adulthood that biologically requires that we become less interested in other people in that way?

You know, since we have to care for children, if we're going to if the species is going to survive, I don't think this is part of our biological nature. I really don't think so. But I do think that, you know, it's, it's not our culture, I mean, I think it's much more specific, if you're going to establish a hierarchy, you know, you got to break the horizontal, that is mutual understanding, empathy relationship, and what happens is, we'll get back to our gender, they get gendered feminine. And then growing up to be a man or to be an important person means to dissociate yourself from human qualities that are seen as feminine. And so empathy and caring seem to fall by the wayside. But it it's, it's a tension between who we are as humans, and really the structures of patriarchy. It's, it's, it's interesting, because as humans, we really inherently have that least in a rudimentary form, you know, the capacity to love and to live democratically with others. And you can traumatize those capacities. You know, and bullying would be a good example of the extreme of it, but it's a tension between our nature and the culture we have. I don't, I wouldn't say just the culture because I think, you know, there's a tension in our society right now between our commitment to democratic ideals and values and the continuation of patriarchal power and privilege. And you know, you can you can see how that tension plays out and how it grips men and women in somewhat different ways.

It's always it's always interesting to compare the overall vision with with the individual instances. And so I'm going to ask, really about patriarchy and academia before I get to the question of activism, which I've been promising to ask for the last 10 minutes, which is, in a different voice was very critical of Lawrence Colbert's schema of of moral development. And you were working with Kohlberg when you publish this book. How did he react to the criticism?

Well, you see, that's interesting, because initially, what culpers reaction and he wrote a very, very generous endorsement of the book in his point was that I had, he said, I had helped him make sense of data of his that he couldn't understand, which was girls responses to his dilemmas and so forth. And I had extended his work is how he saw it and how I saw it, too.

That's tremendously Jerry did further. Yeah, that's really nice. It was extremely

nice, extremely generous. And then it got put into a framework where it was seen as, you know, a challenge to his theory. Well, it was a challenge to his theory, in the sense of saying, there's a different voice and, and he and I, long after the book was published, we taught together and the argument we had, and we had it in public with our students. And it was true as he thought that the care ethic could be a be route through his six stages. And I thought it reframed the entire conception of what was moral development. And we disagreed. And that's what academics do. We disagreed we disagreed and publicly argued about it and I wrote a paper. It was published in the Journal of moral education called Remembering Larry. And it was about the difference between what went what I remember word of this relationship and how it got constructed as a Kohlberg versus Gilligan and my work as somehow a threat to his. And you know, that's the larger question about the academic world or you could say about the activist world was a friend of mine has this wonderful way of summing it up, Wendy Purefoy, she says you can say to somebody, you can come into my house, you can come into any room of my house, but it's still my house. And that's different from saying, let's redesign the house. I've said that my work was saying, let's redesign the house, as opposed to now women can do what men used to do. You know, we used to be men only. And

so so it's so the activist world, frames it as a competition. The academic world frames it as competition history is framing it as a theoretical account of competition, how, how does your role as an activist, both allow you and prevent you from clarifying what you really meant? Does being an activist and as being famous, and just having the access to the voice that you have, doesn't make it harder or easier to do your work and to and to articulate your work in the way that you want it to be understood?

Well, you know, I have to say, Jack, when I published my book, it didn't occur to me that anyone would read it other than my mother, or the people whose offices around Oh, that's

how I feel about the show. So I understand.

I mean, so it was a start, it was a revelation to me that what seemed to me to be such an issue in this sort of particular world I was living in was an issue for so many people. And the fact that there was all that resonance out there, it has been incredible for me, I mean, I have so appreciated people's responses, you know, and people who, who, when you write about psychology, or you write about voices, and people, it resonates with people, that's a very, very, very deep affirmation. And that's been just incredibly moving and meaningful to me. And I've learned a lot from that. And then, of course, if you're in the public, you have a persona. And, you know, sometimes you're kind of seen as saying all kinds of things that you would you did, you didn't say or wouldn't say, so you have to kind of battle with your image. And then the third thing is, I'm a writer, and you know, so I work really in isolation, and I have to preserve that kind of quiet and, you know, the kind of environment with my, with friends, and so forth, that really allows me to keep moving forward in my work, rather than becoming a sort of spokesperson for work I did in the past.

Does does the reaction that people have had the anecdotal evidence, the emails, the conversations, does all the support that you get for the book, does that count as empirical data? And what I mean by that is, do you see these reactions as verification of your theory or argument? Or is that so outside the realm of a control group, so to speak, that it's nice and it makes you feel good and all that, but it's not a part of the study?

Well, after an a different voice was published a man journalist in Boston stopping on street and said to me, you've explained my marriage. And you think if you're listening, and you're trying to see how there can be certain assumptions that different that leads him system, in a systemic misunderstandings between women and men, and somebody comes up to you, and says, you know, like, even the example that the 11 year old Amy was answering a different question. That's why the interviewer couldn't hear her. And somebody says, You've explained my marriage or somebody else said, You explain my divorce. I mean, you think yeah, you know, you heard something that resonates that rings true to people. Or if I, you know, talk about, like, if I give the couple of anecdotes I gave on the air about little boys or the five year old who says to his father, you know, if you hit me, who would hit him and then was very remorseful and the little five year old says to him, you're afraid if you hit me when I grow up, I'll hit my children, which is exactly what the Father was afraid of. But he and he said it. And then you get a rush of people coming up and giving you seven more anecdotes like that, which just means the voice you heard is a voice that other people are hearing to and they're hearing it in their children. And what I've done is provided kind of acoustic for them. So instead of that voice just falling into dead air, it has some strength in it grows. That that is very validating. If you're reading about the psychological world, people should recognize it. It's there, it's out there. That's different from doing a kind of experimental control group study. But I don't do that kind of work. My work is always what I think of as the pilot study, it opens up a new area. And then later people can do that kind of work.

You know, one of the reasons why I started the show by talking about my parents is, is when I was telling my wife that you were gonna be on the show and very excited about it. I remarked to her that, that, in a different voice was one of the earliest books that I remember that changed the way that I looked at the world. But in fact, that's not an accurate way of describing it. It was one of the early books that legitimated the way that I looked at the world that explained that my understanding was valid, and that I could, again, make sense of this relationship I had with these with my two parents. And so this just has been tremendously valuable to me. And while on that note, unfortunately, our time is at an end it goes by so quickly. Carol Gilligan, thank you so much for joining us for answering all the questions and just taking the time to teach us as you have been doing for so many years.

Thank you, Jack. It's been a pleasure. And

we will be back for a wrap up right after this.

Visit IPP ELLs blog P QED philosophical questions every day. For more philosophical discussions of everyday life. Comment on the entries and share your points of view with an ever growing community of professional and amateur philosophers. You can access the blog and view more information on our schedule our broadcasts and the Y radio store at www dot philosophy and public life.org. You're listening to Prairie Public and us information and music service in partnership with the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University.

You're back listening to Jack Russell wants to lean on why philosophical discussion about everyday life. You've been talking, we've been talking to Carol Gilligan, about her book in a different voice and the work that has come after it. It was a remarkable discussion for many reasons. But it's always a challenging reminder, to be told that what a book says isn't always what people think it says texts have lives of their own. People have reputations, arguments become associated with political debates, and in a different voice has become such a classic in such a very important and core issue in our society, that it becomes associated with the most divisive, the most angry, the most complicated politics. But Carol Gilligan's message and her own words is that women are human. It's an odd world that we live in where this is a shocking and radical idea. And I would like to think and I suspect Carol Gilligan would like to think and our listeners would like to think that it's not as shocking today, as it was 40 years ago, but we look at the world. And it's easy to be shocked by that claim. Still, not just in the United States, but in around the world where women's humanities are not being asserted in the same way. And when we do talk about women's humanity, we end up talking about him versus her, we end up talking about what it makes what it takes to make a man what it takes to take a woman and we see them in opposition as polar opposites. A boy is opposite to a girl. But as Carol points out, the second we start talking about how different they are, we end up having to talk about who's better. And you can't ask an objective question like that you can't ask who is categorically better at anything. There may be times when one way of thinking is easier, or more expedient, or more helpful or more sophisticated. But women and men are not in opposition, they are in a similar project. And that actually brings up the question that Jan from mine not asked, which is the question of bullying. And as she and Carol were talking, it occurred to me that making women invisible is a form of bullying. Making women experience the world as if they don't count as if they don't have a voice different or otherwise, is a form of bullying, but it's a form of bullying that was institutionalized in psychology before Carol Gilligan came along and is still very much a part of the way we do certain kinds of science, certain kinds of morality, certain kinds of politics, making people Invisible is a form of bullying because what people want more than anything else is to have their voices heard to be validated. And so how do we do that now? Well with little girls, we sexualize them. We call attention to them by giving them inappropriate clothes by expecting them to grow up too soon, by making their very identities about the objects that they are and the pleasures that they may someday and let's hope someday give. But as Carol Gilligan said, the surest way to shut a girl up is to sexualize her at a young age, making her an object, forcing her to be something much less than she is, is a form of taking away her voice. And what is astonishing is that 40 years after its publication, actually 48 years after its publication, in a different voice is still teaching us a tremendous amount, and still saying things that should be obvious, but are really quite radical. You've been listening to why philosophical discussions about everyday life. I'm your host, Jack Russell Weinstein. Thank you for joining us, and I hope you'll join us again in a month.

Why as broadcast on the second Sunday of every month, it is funded by the Institute for philosophy and public life. Prairie Public Broadcasting, the North Dakota Humanities Council in the University of North Dakota College of Arts and Sciences. Skip word is our studio engineer. Wise music is written and performed by Mark Weinstein, and can be found on his album Louis soul. For more of his music, visit jazz flute weinstein.com or myspace.com/mark Weinstein next month literacy expert Deborah Brandt joins us for a challenging discussion about the morality of ghost writing, and the role authors play in books that bear their names. Tune in Sunday, March 13, at 5pm Central here on Prairie Public or at our website at WWW dot y radio. show.org. Philosophy is everywhere you make it and we hope we've inspired you with our discussion today. Remember, as we say at the institute, there is no ivory tower.