Carol Gilligan on Women and Moral Development | Big Think

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Women answer moral questions from their relational understanding of others, Carol Gilligan says.

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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:

Question: How do women differ from men when it comes to moral dilemmas?

Carol Gilligan: Well the women’s started with a simple premise, which is that we live in relationship with one another and that where essentially relational response to people so the idea of a sort of isolated individual standing alone looking up at the sky for sort of eternal principles whether they where continent principles or whatever, it was like “no-no-no look around you,” it is like you live on a trampoline and if we take, if we move it affects a whole lot of people. So, you have to be very aware of those relationships, so it was not as if women where taking the opposite, they where questioning the whole paradigm, not exquisitely, but in both impressively. I remember I was teaching a section of this class, where they where talking about moral dilemmas. If you were in a life boat, did you jump out that kind of thing. So, anyway then there was the Vietnam war was going on and college students where being drafted. In my section, we tried talked about the war and the students didn’t want to talk about it. I thought that was very interesting, particularly the men and the reason why is I realized, is that their decisions about the world would based not only on timeless principles of Just and unjust war, but how their actions would affect, people who are they love and care about their family, may be a love relationship or something and they knew that to care about relationships was to be like a women. So, they didn’t want to say it, but they also had enough integrity that they didn’t want to misrepresent themselves. So, I remember as a teaching, I moved. We read Camus novel the ‘Plague’ which as if you suddenly find yourself in the middle of the city and the Plague comes even then he didn’t weren’t responsible, what was your responsibility to other people suffer with, and I remember it was great, because we are in this long discussion of this novel ‘The Plague’ and one of the students said that is the draft dilemma and then we have really started talking about. So, I knew that these theories that represented man as thinking only in the abstract, if they where morally matured and self with why you are not reflecting men’s life either, but it was after that time of hearing women’s voices. I have to emphasize that because in that study we interviewed at street clinics in the south end of Boston and at in University Health Services, we had the most, we had a very diverse range of women’s voices...

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