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Carol Gilligan expressed the hope that her work constituted a continuation of Karen Horney's investigation into women's psychological development with its emphasis on the significance of cultural context. In a collaborative effort, Gilligan and her colleagues conducted interviews with public and private school students in Boston; Troy, New York; and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in an attempt to pinpoint the apparent discontinuity between adolescent girls' political resistance, “an insistence on knowing what one knows and a willingness to be outspoken,” and their psychological resistance, “a reluctance to know what one knows, and a fear that such knowing, if spoken, will endanger relationships and threaten survival.”
She noted that as a result of psychological resistance, young girls are faced with a paradox: In an effort to preserve a culturally sanctioned relationship, they take themselves out of the relationship and “self-consciously let go of themselves.” As an adolescent girl put it, “I was losing track of myself, really, and losing the person I was.” Gilligan asks how girls can both “enter and stay outside of, be educated in and then change, what has been for centuries a man's world?”
The results of her studies suggest that the answer may lie in women's relationships to girls entering adolescence: “Women teaching girls … may discover that they are harboring within themselves a girl who lives in her body … who intensely desires relationships and knowledge, and who, perhaps at the time of adolescence, went underground or was overwhelmed.” If such mentors can rediscover the girl within themselves, Gilligan asserted that it is possible that “they can teach girls that they can say what they know and not be left all alone.”