Gilligan Says Women's Voices Are Undervalued

Throughout the ages, women's resilience and resistance has often been undervalued, Professor of Education Carol Gilligan told an audience of about 120 students and community members at the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel last night.

Gilligan is the author of the nationally-acclaimed In a Different Voice and is known for her work in women's psychology.

In times of political change like the present, however, Gilligan said that women's voices have become more audible.

"When an important system is breaking up or in transition, then women's voices are in the forefront," Gilligan said during a speech titled "Women's Voices, Women's Silences."

"We are right now in the midst of exactly such a time," she added.

Adolescence is an especially difficult period in women's lives, Gilligan said.

"Across the twentieth century, this observation has been made: that gifted young women often experience psychological distress at the time of adolescence," she said.

Gilligan said Anne Frank's diary is an example of a strong adolescent voice censored by the constraints of society. In 1942, Anne and her family, who were Jewish, went into hiding from the Germans in an attic in Amsterdam. In the next two years, from the time she was 13 to 15, Anne kept a journal of her experience living in the attic.

Gilligan cited passages from an unexpurgated edition of the diary published in the United States in 1989, which included three versions: Version A was Anne's original writings, B was the version Anne herself censored in 1944 and C was the version finally published.

Most striking, Gilligan said, was the disparity between version A and version B. In version A, Anne writes freely about a photograph of herself, her sexuality and her act of writing the diary. In version B, none of those passages appear, Gilligan said.

"The unselfconscious writing of the A version doesn't imagine an audience," Gilligan said. "You can see how this voice [in version B] starts to cover over and anticipate the audience and the response."

In addition to the story of Anne Frank, Gilligan cited the stories of Psyche and of the hysterical women Freud interviewed in the late nineteenth century as examples of women helping themselves and teaching men through their inner strength.

"It's a story about a woman resisting not seeing and not speaking," Gilligan said of Psyche's decision to fall in love with Eros despite the disapproval of her parents, her sisters and an oracle.

She elaborated on the theme of silent women by referring to Shakespeare's plays.

"In the comedies, women are speaking," Gilligan said. "In the tragedies, they go mad (Hamlet), they're strangled (Othello), they unsex themselves (Macbeth) or they say nothing (King Lear)."

Throughout history, Gilligan said, women have experienced dissociation--" a process by which you can come not to know what you know."

She gave as an example women's innate knowledge that infants can form relationships with their mothers.

But it was only after studies appeared proving those relationships that women began talking about them and that the idea became widely accepted.

Dissociation especially occurs in adolescents, she said, who find themselves torn between their inner and outer selves.

"What she cannot see is how she can be herself and be in the world," said Gilligan, referring to Anne's final diary entry about her "dual personality." "The outer situation is doubled by an inner situation, where she feels she is hiding in her relationships."