Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Biography
Carol
Gilligan was born November 28, 1936 in New York City. She grew up in New York
City where her mother was a teacher and therapist and her father was an attorney.
She is a writer, psychologist, political activist, teacher, and mother. She received
her BA in literature in 1958 from Swarthmore
College. She obtained her maters in clinical psychology and her doctorate in
social psychology. She began teaching at
Harvard University in 1967 alongside Erik Erickson, and began working as a
research assistant for Lawrence Kohlberg who studied moral development.
Gilligan became critical of his work claiming he left out women from his
studies and only focused on white males. As a result Gilligan then focused her
work on the moral development of girls.
Work/Professional
Life
Carol Gilligan helped form a new psychology
for women. She helped women have a voice and worked to render women’s lives
visible. Gilligan’s work focuses on women and the idea of self and selfishness.
She began listening to women and developed four questions to ask:
1. Who is speaking?
2. In what body?
3. Telling what story?
4. In what cultural framework is the story
presented?
She
found that women were not listening to themselves or being asked how they felt
in making decisions about their lives. Her famous book is titled In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory
and Women’s Development, published in 1982. Gilligan claimed that women have different
moral tendencies then men do and became known as the founder of “different
feminisms.” Her theory is split into three stages of moral development: social,
social or conventional morality, and post conventional or principled morality.
Gilligan explains her ethics of care theory saying, “The ethics of care starts
from the premise that as humans we are inherently relational, responsive beings
and the human condition is one of connectedness or interdependence.” Gilligan also founded the Harvard Project on Women’s
Psychology and Girls’ Development, and in 1997, she was appointed to Harvard’s
first professorship in gender studies.
Relevance
to Class Materials
Carol Gilligan’s work is extremely
important to our class. She focuses on giving women a voice and hearing women’s
experiences. Gilligan also worked hard to bring women’s experiences into
psychological studies. Our class also focuses on looking at the experiences of
women from a psychological standpoint as well as through a feminist lens. Specifically
when it comes to mothering, women, and care work, Gilligan looks at the way in
which our society places women in categories of selfish and selfless. Women are
expected to be selfless and Gilligan talked to women who were thinking about
choosing abortion and found that they were doing so to please others. Our class
studies the different areas of women’s lives and the ways in which they have
not been studied, accurately represented, and the ways in which women have not
been heard. Gilligan also focuses on women’s lived experiences.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)