In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development.

• Author: Young, Cathy

No book since The Feminine Mystique has had a greater impact on contemporary American feminism than Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Harvard University Press, 1982). A Harvard psychology professor, Gilligan challenges the "masculine bias" of theories that stress the development of an autonomous self as a prerequisite to mature intimacy.

Psychologists such as Erik Erickson, Gilligan complains, acknowledged that psychological development was different for the young woman (who must "attract the man...by whose status she will be defined" and for whom, therefore, self is defined through relationships) yet canonized the "male" process of individuation as the norm, disregarding values rooted in female experience. Through interviews with male and female children and young adults, she seeks to demonstrate that whereas men base their moral judgments on individual rights and abstract principles of right and wrong, women's moral understanding is "contextual," emphasizing human needs, empathy, and interdependence.

Many feminists were disturbed by Gilligan's apparent validation of sex stereotypes and traditional feminine virtues, yet she was championed by such prominent female commentators as Ellen Goodman, and Ms. put her on the cover as Woman of the Year in January 1984. Although, in contrast to legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, Gilligan sees women as moral agents rather than passive victims of patriarchy, her brand of feminism opens the way to fresh charges of male oppression: Institutions are sexist not only if they exclude women but if they include them on "male" terms (expecting them to be as competitive and individualistic as men) and fail to incorporate "female" values. In the past decade, Gilligan's influence has surfaced in educational theories that call for more cooperative, intuitive learning styles attuned to "women's ways of knowing," in claims of women's distinct "caring" political agenda (more social programs), and in feminist jurisprudence, which derides individual rights and objective rules as male fixations.

To a degree, Gilligan corrects the oversights of earlier feminists who seemed to think that liberated women would just assume male roles and life would go on as if the traditionally female nurturing tasks weren't even needed. Yet she is especially irked by the view (espoused by some of the male psychologists she takes on) that "female" moral judgments are appropriate primarily in...