Carol Gilligan

Carol Gilligan
Carol Gilligan and James Gilligan, 2011
Born	(1936-11-28) November 28, 1936
Occupation	Professor
Nationality	United States
Subject	Psychology, Ethics, Feminism
Notable works	In a Different Voice

Carol Gilligan (/ˈɡɪlɪɡən/; born November 28, 1936) is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist best known for her work with and against Lawrence Kohlberg on ethical community and ethical relationships, and certain subject-object problems in ethics.

She is a professor at New York University and a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge. She is teaching as a visiting professor at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She is best known for her 1982 work, In a Different Voice. She is the founder of difference feminism.

Background and career

Carol Gilligan was raised in a Jewish family in New York City. She was the only child of a lawyer, William Friedman, and nursery school teacher, Mabel Caminez. She attended Walden School, a progressive private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side, played piano and pursued a career in modern dance during her graduate studies. 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.

She began her teaching career at Harvard in 1967, receiving tenure with the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1988. Gilligan taught for two years at the University of Cambridge (from 1992–1994) as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions. In 1997, she became Patricia Albjerg Graham Chair in Gender Studies at Harvard.

Gilligan left Harvard in 2002 to join New York University as a full professor with the School of Education and the School of Law. She is also visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in the Centre for Gender Studies.

Best known for her work, In a Different Voice (1982), 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 Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan. She published her first novel, Kyra, in 2008.

She is married to James Gilligan, M.D., who directed the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School.

Philosophy

Gilligan is known for her work with Lawrence Kohlberg on his stages of moral development as well as her criticism of the stages. Despite being Kohlberg's research assistant, Gilligan argued that Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development were male-oriented, which limited their ability to be generalized to women in particular. Gilligan thus 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.

Awards

• 1992 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education
• 1996 Time Magazine - one of the 25 most influential Americans
• 1998 4th Annual Heinz Award in the Human Condition

Books

• ISBN 9780674445444

From the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Co-written with her son Jonathan and produced by Prime Stage Theatre in November 2011.

Educational fact sheet about the play.

• Details.

External links

• Biography of Gilligan at Webster University
• 2008 Commencement Speech (Mount Holyoke College)
• Conversation with Carol Gilligan
• Carol Gilligan's Profile on Psychology's Feminist Voices
• Carol Gilligan Video produced by Makers: Women Who Make America