Carol Gilligan on 'In A Different Voice' | Big Think

Carol Gilligan on 'In A Different Voice'

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Carol Gilligan recounts a much greater impact than expected.

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Carol Gilligan:

In 2002, Carol Gilligan became University Professor at New York University, with affiliations in the School of Law, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is currently teaching a seminar at the Law School on Resisting Injustice and an advanced research seminar on The Listening Guide Method of Psychological Inquiry. She is a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge affiliated with the Centre for Gender Studies and with Jesus College.

She received an A.B. in English literature from Swarthmore College, a masters degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. Her landmark book In A Different Voice (1982) is described by Harvard University Press as "the little book that started a revolution." Following In A Different Voice, she initiated the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development and co-authored or edited 5 books with her students.

She received a Senior Research Scholar 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.

She was a member of the Harvard faculty for over 30 years and in 1997 became Harvard's first professor of Gender Studies, occupying the Patricia Albjerg Graham chair.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Carol Gilligan: I sat down to write this essay, was the first thing I think I ever wrote, that wasn’t for school to make sense to myself of why it was so hard for women to say what they felt or thought and be heard without having it distorted and come back to them in some way that just did not even sound like what they where trying to say and also how come I hadn’t seen the absence of women from the psychology I was teaching. So, I thought may be my mother would read this book or people who worked on the same floor I worked on it at Harvard, it never occurred to me, but I wrote this paper and it started to circulate like almost as a kind of underground thing. So, that was a huge discovery for me just really huge I did expected, Harvard press when they published the book, they published 3000 copies, nobody expected. It’s had a huge impact, I mean I will tell you like one good example, which is women use to be seen as unintelligent, because we were set to be emotional, men where rational and women were emotional. Well, honestly if you think about that ridiculous, because men have feelings and women think kind of though. So, now we have this high phase emotional intelligence and it’s a big wanted face, because it’s cooperation are suppose to incorporate it and people forget that where that came from was this work questioning this division between emotional women and intelligent humans and saying when you join these qualities which had been as seen as women’s qualities with human quality here those where all human quality. So, we have emotion intelligence and relation of self and most recently the feeling brain and that means that the whole paradigm has changed.