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Reading group: Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (1982), read forty years on

Femke Bosman Fellow
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Moral theoriesAmericanAnalyticCare ethicsFeminist philosophyCarol Gilligan#carol-gilligan#ethics-of-care#moral-development#reading-group
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In a Different Voice is one of the most cited books in the history of ethics and one of the most misremembered. Gilligan was a psychologist, not a philosopher, and the book began as a response to Lawrence Kohlberg's scale of moral development, on which girls and women tended to score lower. Her argument was that the scale had been built on a particular kind of reasoning, about rights and rules, and was missing another voice, organised around responsibility and relationship.

I run a reading group on feminist philosophy, and every year newcomers arrive believing the book says women are naturally caring and men naturally just. It does not quite say that, and the gap between what it says and what it is remembered as saying is worth a reading group.

Week 1. The introduction and first chapter: what Gilligan saw in Kohlberg's framework, and her claim about where the different voice comes from.

Week 2. The chapter with Jake and Amy, two eleven-year-olds responding to the Heinz dilemma (should a man steal a drug he cannot afford to save his wife?). This is the most famous passage; read it slowly.

Week 3. The study of women deciding whether to have an abortion, where the voice is heard in real decisions rather than hypotheticals.

Week 4. The closing chapters on maturity, where she suggests the two voices need each other.

Please bring both admiration and objections. The empirical claims have been heavily contested since, and so has the politics.

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6 replies

  1. Nadia Haddad

    Fellow

    Week 1. What surprised me is how carefully Gilligan qualifies the link to gender. She says the different voice is characterised by theme rather than by gender, and that the association with women is an empirical observation, not a claim about nature. That sentence alone would save a lot of seminar arguments. Sitting with families on the unit, I also noticed that her “different voice” is the one I hear from them every week, men and women both.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Farhana Akter

    Fellow

    Week 2. Jake treats the Heinz dilemma like a maths problem: life is worth more than money, so steal the drug. Amy keeps asking why Heinz cannot talk to the druggist, and worries about what happens to the wife if Heinz goes to prison. Kohlberg's scoring counts Amy as less mature. Reading it from a maternity ward, I think Amy is the one who has actually met a pharmacist. Her questions are the ones I would ask in a real crisis.

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    1. Keisha Monroe

      Fellow

      Week 2, with a different angle. Patricia Hill Collins later argued that what Gilligan called the different voice, an ethic of caring and personal accountability, is also deeply rooted in African American cultural traditions, shaped by history and not only by gender. That seems to me a powerful correction: the voice is real, but its distribution tells you about social position, not about womanhood.

  3. Gerrit Venter

    Fellow

    An outsider's week 3. I am a retired rugby coach reading this on Femke's recommendation, and I found the abortion study the hardest and best part. The women are not choosing between rules; they are trying not to abandon anyone, including themselves. It struck me that Gilligan's “selfishness versus responsibility” is a tension I saw in every captain I ever picked.

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  4. Thamarai Raman

    Fellow

    Week 4. As someone who left paid work to raise two children, I came to this book expecting to feel flattered and instead felt challenged. Gilligan does not say care is enough. She says care that excludes the self is not mature care. That is a harder lesson than the one the book is remembered for, and a more useful one.

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  5. Femke Bosman

    Fellow

    Nadia's quotation about theme rather than gender and Keisha's point from Collins together give the corrected reading I wanted: a voice defined by its concerns, distributed by social position. On the empirical side, later meta-analyses found small or no overall gender differences in moral reasoning scores, which fits that reading better than the popular one.

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