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Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice - the "little book that started a revolution" - brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time.
Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the "different voice" (of care ethics), although initially heard as a "feminine" voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story.
With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people's experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Women's Voices and Women's Silences
Chapter 2: Why Nobody Talks about the Abortion Decisions
Chapter 3: Enter Eve
Chapter 4: Moral Injury
Chapter 5: In a Different Voice: Act II
Epilogue: The Ethic of Care
About the author
Carol Gilligan is University Professor at New York University.
Summary
Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice - the "little book that started a revolution" - brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time.
Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the "different voice" (of care ethics), although initially heard as a "feminine" voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story.
With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people's experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.
Report
A TLS Book of the Year 2023
"essential reading for our time"
--Times Literary Supplement
"Having helped the modern world to hear female voices, Carol Gilligan now takes the next step of helping us to hear a voice that is truly unified and human."
--Gloria Steinem
"Equipped with a psychologist's queries and a novelist's sensibilities, Gilligan invites her readers to accompany her on a revelatory journey. She shows us that, far from being distinctively feminine, 'relational capacities such as empathy and emotional intelligence' are actually universal human potentials, waiting to be set free from patriarchal matrices. A beautiful experience."
--Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
"It is rare for anyone with a public platform to revisit old work and openly admit they were wrong. It is rarer still in academia where the tendency... is for a 'selection bias': to publish evidence that backs up a pre-proposed thesis. But given what Gilligan came up against in the early days of her career, she cannot see herself working any other way."
--The New Statesman
