Background
Dr. Carol Gilligan is an only
child born on November 28, 1936 of a lawyer named William Friedman and a
nursery school teacher names Mabel Caminez. She was raised in a Jewish family
in New York City. She describes herself as a Jewish child of the Holocaust era
and grew up with firm moral and political convictions.
As a child she studied language and music. Growing up she played the
piano and pursued a career in modern dance during graduate school. She attended Swarthmore College and earned
her B.A in English literature. She earned a master’s degree in clinical
psychology from Radcliffe College and her PH.D. in social psychology from
Harvard University in 1964. She is married to James Gilligan,
M.D., who directed the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical
School. They have three children together.
Professional
life and work
Dr. Carol Gilligan is an
influential American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist. She began teaching
at Harvard University in 1967. In 1970 she became a research assistant for
Lawrence Kohlberg known as a great theorist of moral development. In
2002, Carol Gilligan became a Professor at New York University (NYU). She
currently also works with NYU’s School of Law, the Steinhardt School of
Culture, Education, and Human Development, and the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences. She teaches a seminar at the Law School on Resisting Injustice and an
advanced research seminar on The Listening Guide Method of Psychological
Inquiry. She is a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge affiliated
with the Centre for Gender Studies and with Jesus College. She is the published author of , In a Different Voice,
Harvard University Press, (1982), Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of
Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education, Harvard University
Press, (1989), Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at
Emma Willard School, Harvard University Press, (1990), Meeting at the
Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, Harvard University
Press, (1992), Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and
Relationships, Harvard University Press, (1997), The Birth of Pleasure, Knopf,
(2002), Kyra, Random House, (2008), The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy,
Resistance, & Democracy's Future, Cambridge University Press, (2009) (with
co-author David A.J. Richards), and a
dramatic adaptation of the novel The Scarlet Letter, co-written with her son
Jonathan and produced by Prime Stage Theatre in November 2011. She has also earned several awards including the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 1992, Time Magazine - one of the 25 most
influential Americans in 1996, and 4th
Annual Heinz Award in the Human Condition in 1998.
Relevance
to class materials
Dr. Carol Gilligan is very well
known for her work with and against Lawrence Kohlberg. Eventually Gilligan began
to criticize some of Kohlberg' s work because she realized
that most studies of psychological and moral development involved only privileged
white men. She believed that this caused a biased opinions that oppressed women
.she criticized Kohlberg’s stage
theory of moral development because the males view on individual rights was prioritized
and higher staged than women’s views of
development in terms of its caring effect on human relationships. She voices her opinions in her famous
book " In a different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women ' s
Development " which was published in 1982.
“Gilligan's
book is a complaint against the male centered personality psychology of Freud
and Erickson, and the male centered developmental psychology of Kohlberg. Her
complaint is not that it is unjust to leave women out of psychology (though she
says that). Her complaint is that it is not good psychology if it leaves out
half of the human race.”
Dr. Gilligan proposes
a stage theory of moral development for women:
Sources
Posted by Christie Logrono
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