Occupation Professor Role Psychologist Name Carol Gilligan | Nationality United States | |
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Born November 28, 1936 (age 87) ( 1936-11-28 ) Subject Psychology, Ethics, Feminism Parents Mabel Caminez, William Friedman Books In a Different Voice, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map, Joining the Resistance, The Deepening Darkness, Kyra Similar People | ||
Carol gilligan on the female psychology deficit
Carol Gilligan (; born November 28, 1936) is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships, and certain subject-object problems in ethics.
Contents
- Carol gilligan on the female psychology deficit
- Carol Gilligan and Virginia Held Difference and The Contribution of Feminist Care Ethics
- Background and career
- Psychology
- Ethics of care
- Critique
- Awards
- References
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 ethics of care.
Carol Gilligan and Virginia Held, "Difference and The Contribution of Feminist Care Ethics"
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.
Psychology
Gilligan is known for her work with Lawrence Kohlberg on his stages of moral development as well as her criticism of his approach to 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 females. 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.
Ethics of care
In her book In a Different Voice Gilligan presented her theory Ethics of Care as an alternative to Lawrence Kohlberg's hierarchal and principled approach to ethics. In contrast to Kohlberg, who claimed that girls did not, and therefore neither women, in general develop their moral abilities to the highest levels, Gilligan argued that women approached ethical problems differently than men. According to Gilligan women's moral is centered around the understanding of responsibilities and relationship whilst men's moral is instead centered around the understanding of morality of fairness, which is tied to rights and rules. Women also tend to see moral issues as a problem of conflicting responsibilities rather than competing rights so whilst women perceive the situation as more contextual and narrative men define the situation as more formal and abstract. She calls the different moral approaches "Ethics of care" and "Ethics of justice" and recognizes them as fundamentally incompatible.
Critique
Carol Gilligan's research methods and the scarce availability of her evidence have been criticized by many scholars and psychological researchers (e.g. Christina Hoff Sommers). This was especially relevant for the publication of her book In a Different Voice, for many researchers have searched for the evidence, which had been kept confidential because of the sensitive nature of the subject. That was however, according to some, a sign of obstruction of evidence, which is a recurring flaw with her studies.
Carol Gilligan's Ethics of care have rendered critique from other feminist scholars such as Jaclyn Friedman who argues that the different ethics of women and men are in fact a result of societal expectations. Since we expect women and men to think differently about ethics women and men as a result do present differences. The different modes of reasoning are therefore a socially constructed dichotomy simply reproducing itself through our expectations of how women and men act.