Carol Gilligan

Carol Gilligan (born November 28, 1936) is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships.

In an article where Gilligan revisited In a Different Voice, she commented: "I entered the conversation about women and morality in the late 1960s, a time in the U.S. that witnessed a convergence of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the movement to stop atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, the movement to end poverty, the women's movement, and the gay liberation movement. I was teaching at Harvard with Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst working in the Freudian tradition, and Lawrence Kohlberg, a cognitive-developmental psychologist working in the tradition of Piaget. To all these men—Freud and Erikson, Piaget and Kohlberg—women appeared deficient in development."

Gilligan proposed her theory of stages of female moral development based on her idea of moral voices.

According to Gilligan, there are two kinds of moral voices: that of the masculine and the feminine.

The masculine voice is "logical and individualistic", meaning that the emphasis in moral decisions is protecting the rights of people and making sure justice is upheld.

The feminine voice places more emphasis on protecting interpersonal relationships and taking care of other people.

This voice focuses on the "care perspective", which means focusing on the needs of the individual in order to make an ethical decision.

For Gilligan, Kohlberg's stages of moral development were emphasizing the masculine voice, making it difficult to accurately gauge a woman's moral development because of this incongruity in voices.

Gilligan argues that androgyny, or integrating the masculine and the feminine, is the best way to realize one's potential as a human.

Gilligan's stages of female moral development has been shown in business settings as an explanation to the different ways men and women handle ethical issues in the workplace as well.

Gilligan developed her own stages of moral development with the idea that women make moral and ethical decision based on how they will affect others in mind.

She began her teaching career as a lecturer at the University of Chicago (where her husband was a medical intern) from 1965 to 1966, teaching the Introduction to Modern Social Science.

She then became a lecturer at Harvard University in 1967, lecturing on General Education.

After becoming an assistant professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1971, she received tenure there in 1988 as a full professor.

She is known for her book In a Different Voice (1982), which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.

Gilligan taught for two years at the University of Cambridge (from 1992 to 1994) as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions and as a visiting professorial fellow in the Social and Political Sciences.

In 1996, Time magazine listed her among America's 25 most influential people.

She is considered the originator of the ethics of care.

Carol Gilligan was raised in a Jewish family in New York City.

She was the only child of a lawyer, William Friedman, and nursery school teacher, Mabel Caminez.

She attended the public Hunter Model School and the Walden School, a progressive private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side and played piano.

Gilligan received her B.A. summa cum laude in English literature from Swarthmore College, a master's degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College, and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University where she wrote her doctoral dissertation "Responses to Temptation: An Analysis of Motives".

Disillusioned by academia, Gilligan left academia to pursue a career in modern dance.

She is married to James Gilligan, M.D., who directed the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School.

Together, James and Carol had three children: Jonathan, Timothy, and Christopher.

Jonathan Gilligan is an associate professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University.

Jonathan has also collaborated with his mother, to write the play The Scarlet Letter (a feminist adaptation of Hawthorne's novel) and the libretto for the opera Pearl.

Timothy Gilligan is the vice-chair for Education and associate professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute.

Christopher Gilligan is the Associate Chief Medical Officer of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Director of the Brigham and Women's Spine Center.

In 1997, she became Patricia Albjerg Graham Chair in Gender Studies at Harvard.

From 1998 until 2001, she was a Visiting Meyer Professor and later visiting professor at New York University School of Law.

Gilligan eventually left Harvard in 2002 to join New York University as a full professor with the School of Education and the School of Law.

She was also a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in the Centre for Gender Studies from 2003 until 2009.

Gilligan studied women's psychology and girls' development and co-authored or edited a number of texts with her students.

She contributed the piece "Sisterhood Is Pleasurable: A Quiet Revolution in Psychology" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan.

She published her first novel, Kyra, in 2008.

Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009.

In 2015, Gilligan taught for a semester at New York University in Abu Dhabi.

Gilligan is known for her work with Lawrence Kohlberg on his stages of moral development as well as her criticism of his approach to the stages.

As Kohlberg's research assistant, Gilligan argued that Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development were male-oriented, which limited their ability to be generalized to females.