In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

Chapter 5 begins by moving out from the context of psychological development theories and the specific context of the moral dilemma of abortion to the broader sociohistorical context of the women’s rights movement. While Gilligan has been presenting a rights orientation as a traditionally masculine one and a responsibility or care orientation as specifically feminine, here she highlights how women themselves have necessarily taken a rights orientation in the political demand and movement for women’s rights.

While earlier in In a Different Voice Gilligan presents what she theorizes as gendered patterns of Separation and Attachment in Human and Moral Development and their different orientations toward moral decision-making, in this chapter these two ways of approaching moral dilemmas are considered in relation to one another. Specifically, Gilligan argues for the need for a care ethic to be modified by a rights ethic.

Gilligan argues that a rights ethic prevents a care ethic from becoming exploitative; rights are needed so that a care ethic does not discount the individual but, instead, includes that individual as one equally in need of care. An ethic of care can be self-destructive when it does not assume the value of the self; an ethic of care when brought into contact with a rights ethic can allow for interrelationships rather than relationships of dependence or exploitation. When morality, though generally understood as developing in the “interplay between self and others” (139) is reduced to pure obligation and selflessness, it is “reduced to an opposition between self and other” (139, emphasis added). As a result of the energy put forward toward women’s rights, Gilligan sees women’s approaches to themselves as improving over the last 100 years, as evidenced in the two novels she analyzes, George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss and Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall.

Regarding Gilligan’s method, she continues to rely on Listening to Different Voices in Psychological Research, especially the voices of women in this chapter. She continues this attention through follow-up interviews with women, many of which occur in 1973, the year of the Roe v Wade ruling. Gilligan is particularly interested in this chapter in the ways that women’s conflicts:

demonstrate the continuation through time of an ethic of responsibility as the center of women’s moral concern, anchoring the self in a world of relationships and giving rise to activities of care, but [how they] also indicate how this ethic is transformed by the recognition of the justice of the rights approach (132).

This transformation is the focus of the chapter, with Gilligan emphasizing that “the right to include oneself in the compass of morality of responsibility was a critical question for college women in the 1970s” (134, emphasis added).

The nature of her research pays attention to the nuances and intricacies of lived experiences and the way people change in response to them. For example, she traces the way that the contextualization of an ethic of care in relation to a rights structure leads one woman, Kate, to “equating responsibility with caring rather than with not hurting” (148, emphasis added). Women’s moral judgments themselves change with the acquisition of rights, where the “paralyzing injunction not to emotionally hurt others [shifts] to an injunction to act responsively toward self and others and thus to sustain connections” (149). This transition moves women away from not only the paralyzing and impossible injunction never to hurt, but also away from an imposed voicelessness out of both obligation and fear.

In considering Gilligan’s research methods again, it is important to note that she continues to quote women, often at length, placing their actual words within her book, so that much of the writing is not Gilligan’s voice but the voices of other women. Along these same lines, Gilligan personalizes her subjects, referring to them by name and providing the lived contexts within which they are making decisions and also the broader contexts in which their decision-making is changing. In this sense, the book itself demonstrates a care ethic on the part of Gilligan, whose research is interrelational. While the book is clearly authored by her, and she claims her right to sole authorship, she also shares the pages with various women, insisting that the reader pay attention to their unique and “different” voices. This creation of a cacophony of voices also reflects Gilligan’s insistence on Using the Dialectic of Dialogue to fully understand the varieties of experiences and perspectives within psychological studies.