Carol Gilligan: An Introduction

It is both a pleasure and a challenge to introduce Carol Gilligan. The pleasure comes from the opportunity to speak about someone who has been a friend, an example of an outspoken intellectual whose perspective on the influence of society on the individual has helped me in working as a psychoanalyst to understand the importance of my patients' developing what she would call “a voice of their own.” The challenge arises from the difficulty of introducing someone who undoubtedly is already known to anyone familiar with the history of feminism in the United States. In 1982, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development was published and over time established Carol Gilligan as a major voice in our understanding of the psychology of women; a voice with compelling power to resist the power of received wisdom and conventional psychological pronouncements about how women's minds were thought to work, how women's minds were inevitably different from those of men, who up to that point were deemed superior in rationality compared to their more emotional female peers.

Since its publication, In a Different Voice has sold more than 700,000 copies. It has been translated into at least twenty languages and appears on the reading list of courses in a wide range of disciplines, from women's studies to ethics, at major universities around the world. Carol's key insight is that men have determined the predominant views of women. In doing so, they managed to claim scientific status for what was largely their preferred vision of what a woman should be. Carol started with Freud—who, early on, listened sympathetically to the words of his female patients, but ultimately retreated into the world of oedipal fantasies—and carefully demonstrated his acceptance of the notion that women are inevitably inferior. For Freud “biology was destiny,” relegating women to a prescribed role in society and a fate of endless penis envy. On rereading In