Exploring Voices in a World of Difference

Emma, a local sixth-grader and a participant in the Harvard Project on the Psychology of Women and Girls, visited Boston's Museum of Fine Arts recently.

Asked to construct a dialogue with a statue in the museum, Emma had two questions: "Are you cold?" and "Would you like some clothes?" The statue, a legless and armless nude, responded, according to Emma's scenario, "I have no money."

Carol Gilligan, the director of the project and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says this story demonstrates Emma's "resistance," both political and psychological. It is this resistance and its implications for gender and behavior studies that Gilligan began to explore in her ground breaking work, In a Different Voice, published in 1982.

"Emma's playfully innocent, slightly irreverent conversation...bespeaks her interest in the scenes which lie behind the paintings and sculpture which she is seeing," Gilligan wrote last year in an article in the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Emma's words are an "inquiry into relationships between artists and models...a curiosity about the psychological dimensions of this connection between men and women."

Emma's questioning illustrates that young girls perceive situations and relationships in a way that many adults, and particularly adult men, do not, Gilligan says. These differences lie at the heart of Gilligan's work and are taken up as central problems for the Harvard Project.

"I am interested in turning points in people's lives, moments of crisis," Gilligan said in an interview recently. This turning point comes around the age of puberty when women's perceptions become "split between their experience and what has been socially constructed as reality," she says.

Girls "go underground," says Gilligan, and their unique voices are lost.

Dodge Study

One of the first attempts to retrieve those voices was the Dodge Study, a long-term research project undertaken at the Emma Willard School, a private girls school in upstate New York. The study was funded by the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation.

Initiated by Gilligan and the school's former principal, the Dodge Study was intended to fill a significant gap in the research done on adolescence. "Up until 1980, adolescent girls had not been studied," Gilligan says.

The Dodge Study began in 1981 and ended three years later. It involved one-on-one interviews with adolescent girls of different ages and resulted in a book of essays called Making Connections.

The girls were asked about their self-images and decision-making processes. They were given a sentence-completion test with questions like: "What gets me into trouble is..."

Gilligan says studies like these have shown how girls' behavior may be different from what was previously perceived as the norm for adolescents. They can "smell bullshit a mile away," says Elizabeth Debold, a fourth-year graduate student who has been involved in many of the Harvard Project's studies.

The study has had a positive effect on the Emma Willard School, says Marjorie G. Whiteman, an administrator there. "It made us rethink a great many things," she says, including dormitory assignments and teaching methods.

The same concerns that initiated the Emma Willard study led Gilligan toward the project that became In a Different Voice. The book grew out of an essay Gilligan wrote in 1975, sitting at her "dining room table," she says. As a graduate student at the Graduate School of Education here, she had noted the absence or inaccuracy of studies about women in the psychological canon.

"Implicitly adopting the male life as the norm, they have tried to fashion women out of a masculine cloth," she wrote of earlier theorists in the introduction to her 1982 book." "In the life cycle, the woman has been the deviant."

"She took the whole field of moral development and asked us to think about moral development of whom and theorizing by whom," says Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard Medical School. "She reminded us that people devising theories do so out of their own experiences and sometimes out of their own limitations."

Two Ways of Thinking

In a Different Voice suggested that their are two ways of thinking about questions of morality, called by Gilligan the "care voice" and the "justice voice." While the justice voice tends to accent abstract principles and laws as reasons for moral behavior, the care voice deals more with emotions and relationships between people.

In a recent interview, Gilligan provided an example of what the care voice might mean, based on a fable presented to children who participated in one of the Harvard Project's studies.

The story involves a family of moles who take pity on a freezing porcupine and allow him to live with them. Eventually, the porcupine's quills cause the moles so much agony that they ask him to leave, and he refuses.

"Young girls talk about the hurt of the moles, the fact that the moles are being hurt," Gilligan says. "One girl asked if they could cover the porcupine with a blaket." The girls are concerned with the feelings of both parties.

By contrast, a more justice-oriented voice might say the porcupine should leave because the house, by right, belongs to the moles: "It's not the porcupine's house; the porcupine has to go."

Although Gilligan writes in her book "the different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but by theme," she does see the care voice as one which occurs more often and more consistently in women.

"Sex difference is the tendency," she says. "Women do tend to talk more from a premise of connection."

Criticism

Gilligan has been criticized for what Pulit zer Prize-winning author Susan Faludi, in her recent book, Backlash, calls "Victorian echoes."

"Gilligan may have left herself wide open to misinterpretation," Faludi wrote. "After disavowing generalizations about either sex, she seems to make them herself." Faludi also felt that the backgrounds and situations of the subjects Gilligan examined were not stressed enough. "Gilligan's 'studies' were not exactly drawn from ideal demographic samples," she wrote.

Zella Luria, a Tufts University psychology researcher who is cited in Faludi's book, agreed with her criticism. "I see no data to warrant the message that Carol Gilligan can tell us," Kuria said in an interview. "I find it psychologically very native to find that our experience is unencumbered knowledge we get from our innards."

Gilligan responded to her critics in a 1986 issue of the feminist journal Signs. "The title of my book was deliberate," she wrote. "It reads 'in a different voice,' not 'in a woman's voice."'

In response to the accusation that her samples were not scientifically representative, she wrote, "To say that social class and education contribute to moral development while experiences typically associated with gender are essentially irrelevant may say more about the way development is being measured than it does about morality or gender."

Mentor and Friend

Those who work with Gilligan look to her as a mentor and friend and see her work as an essential and personal mission.

"What Carol's work is about is my life," says Debold. "She is someone I care deeply about and who has affected my life profoundly."

Dana Jack, a School of Education graduate who studied with Gilligan, is now a professor at Fairhaven College in Washington. "Carol has been wonderful about working with me and pulling me into colleagueship," Jack says.

Her students are, however, at pains to deny any kind of "cultish" atmosphere. "I think a lot of people think the approach is Carol," says Debold. "It is not synonymous with her."

The Project on the Psychology of Women and Girls is currently involved in several research projects intended to broaden and strengthen Gilligan's earlier findings.

There is a Boston-area Writing, Theater and Outing Club designed to help girls learn to "resist" society's pressures and retain their own voices. Other ongoing studies include one dealing with "girls at risk" in an urban public school and an effort to "explore the connection between women and girls" through a series of workshops and seminars.

Gilligan's message to college-aged women is to "listen" for the voices of the girls within them and make an effort to "change the existing order" which may have repressed that voice.

"It you want to sustain women's voices, you get involved in social change," she says. "We need to reaffirm one another's reality."