Carol Gilligan facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Carol Gilligan
Gilligan in 2011
Born	(1936-11-28) November 28, 1936 (age 88) New York City, US
Alma mater	Swarthmore College Radcliffe College Harvard University
Occupation	Professor
Notable work	In a Different Voice Mapping the Moral Domain Making Connections Meeting at the Crossroads The Birth of Pleasure
Spouse(s)	James Gilligan
Children	3
Awards	1984: Ms. Woman of the Year 1992: Grawemeyer Award 1996: Time magazine's 25 most influential people in the United States 1998: Heinz Award

Carol Gilligan (born November 28, 1936) is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist. She is famous for her ideas about how people develop their sense of right and wrong, especially focusing on ethical community and ethical relationships.

Gilligan is a professor at New York University. She also taught at the University of Cambridge. She is well-known for her book In a Different Voice (1982). In this book, she disagreed with some ideas from another psychologist, Lawrence Kohlberg, about how people develop their morals.

In 1996, Time magazine named her one of the 25 most important people in the United States. Many people see her as the person who started the idea of the ethics of care. This idea suggests that caring for others is a key part of making moral decisions.

About Carol Gilligan

Early Life and Education

Carol Gilligan grew up in a New York City family. She was the only child of a lawyer and a nursery school teacher. She went to public and private schools in Manhattan. She also enjoyed playing the piano.

Gilligan studied English literature at Swarthmore College. She then earned a master's degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College. Later, she got her Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. Her doctoral paper was about how people respond to temptations. After her studies, she briefly left university work to pursue modern dance.

Family Life

Carol Gilligan is married to James Gilligan, a doctor. He used to lead a center that studied violence at Harvard Medical School.

They have three children together: Jonathan, Timothy, and Christopher. Jonathan Gilligan is a professor at Vanderbilt University. He has also worked with his mother on a play and an opera. Timothy Gilligan is a professor of medicine. Christopher Gilligan is a medical officer at a hospital.

Carol Gilligan's Career

Gilligan started teaching at the University of Chicago in 1965. She then became a lecturer at Harvard University in 1967. In 1971, she became an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She became a full professor there in 1988.

She also taught for two years at the University of Cambridge. In 1997, she became a special professor in Gender Studies at Harvard. From 1998 to 2001, she was a visiting professor at New York University School of Law.

In 2002, Gilligan left Harvard to join New York University as a full professor. She also taught at the University of Cambridge's Centre for Gender Studies until 2009.

Gilligan studied how women think and how girls develop. She wrote many books with her students. She also wrote a piece for a book called Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium in 2003. In 2008, she published her first novel, Kyra. She also taught at New York University in Abu Dhabi in 2015.

Her Work in Psychology

Carol Gilligan is famous for her work with Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg had a theory about the stages of moral development. Gilligan worked as his research assistant. She later said that Kohlberg's stages mainly focused on how boys and men think. She felt they did not fully explain how girls and women make moral choices.

Gilligan suggested her own theory of moral development. She believed there are two main "moral voices." The "masculine voice" focuses on rules, rights, and justice. It is about being logical and independent. The "feminine voice" focuses more on relationships and caring for others. This is called the "care perspective." It means thinking about people's needs when making a moral decision.

Gilligan argued that Kohlberg's stages mostly used the masculine voice. This made it hard to understand how women's moral thinking developed. She believed that combining both voices, or being "androgynous," helps people reach their full potential. Her ideas have even been used to explain how men and women handle ethical problems at work.

Gilligan developed her own stages of moral development based on her research with women. She used Kohlberg's ideas of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional morality. But she adapted them to show how women make moral decisions based on how their actions affect others.

• Stage 1: Pre-conventional morality

* This stage is about self-interest and survival. A person will choose their own needs first if there is a conflict.

• Transition 1

* During this time, a person realizes they are responsible for others. They might see that they were thinking selfishly before.

• Stage 2: Conventional morality

* This stage is about being selfless and caring for others. A person puts the needs of others before their own, sometimes leading to self-sacrifice.

• Transition 2

* In this transition, a person realizes their own needs are just as important as others' needs. They learn to balance caring for themselves and others. This is a shift from just being "good" to being "truthful" about everyone's needs.

• Stage 3: Post-conventional morality

* In this final stage, people understand how their actions affect others. They take responsibility for these effects. They also take control of their own lives and show strong care for others. Here, a person sees that their needs are as important as others' needs. This leads to a universal ethic of care for everyone.

Her book In a Different Voice explains her ideas in more detail. It was a very important book for the feminist movement.

Carol Gilligan's Important Books

As a feminist, Gilligan has written many books about women and girls, especially during their teenage years. Here are some of her most famous works:

In a Different Voice

This book, published in 1982, is one of Gilligan's most important works. She noticed that many psychologists had focused on men's experiences. They thought that being independent and logical were the most important signs of growing up. Gilligan wanted to give women a chance to share their own perspectives.

She interviewed women about themselves, morality, and how they handled difficult choices. From these interviews, she developed her "ethics of care" framework.

Gilligan also pointed out how older theories didn't fit women's experiences well. For example, she looked at how a boy and a girl might answer a question about whether a man should steal medicine to save his wife. She found that the girl's answer might seem less "mature" by Kohlberg's standards. However, Gilligan argued that this was because the children saw different problems. The boy saw it as a problem of logic and rules. The girl saw it as a problem of human relationships and caring. Gilligan showed that Kohlberg's system didn't fully explain the girl's equally mature way of thinking.

She concluded that the "different voice" she described is not just about gender. It's about a different way of thinking. While she found it often in women's voices, it's a way of looking at the world that anyone can use. Her work encouraged other researchers to look at different perspectives.

By 2022, In a Different Voice had been translated into 20 languages. It had sold over 700,000 copies.

The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love

In this book, Gilligan explores how people find love. She uses stories like Adam and Eve and Cupid to understand why finding love can sometimes be painful before it brings joy. She writes about how powerful love can be and how it can change things.

Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development

Gilligan wrote Meeting at Crossroads with Mikel Brown. They studied 100 girls as they went through their teenage years. The book shares insights into how girls develop and the challenges they face during adolescence. They observed the psychological development of these girls over five years, starting at age 12.

Women, Girls and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance

With Annie G. Rogers and Deborah L. Tolman, Gilligan wrote this book. It looks at the needs of teenage girls. The authors explore how girls' "resistance" can actually be a way for them to stay healthy and express themselves.

Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School

Gilligan, Nona P. Lyons, and Trudy J. Hanmer wrote this book. They explain that adolescence is a very important time for girls. It's a time when girls might feel like they are losing their voice or connection with others. The book discusses how girls' connections with others are linked to their psychology and relationships. It also explores why women sometimes stay silent.

The book includes stories from teenage girls. These stories help to understand their ideas about themselves, relationships, and what is right and wrong. These are all key parts of human development.

Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory

Gilligan and her colleagues Janie Victoria Ward, Betty Bardige, and Jill McLean Taylor wrote this book. It builds on the ideas from In a Different Voice. The authors compare how men and women talk about relationships. They show how ideas like connection, dependence, and responsibility can mean different things to different people. This book helps to include women's voices in the study of psychology and education.

In her first book, Gilligan called the two different ways of thinking "gender specific." In Mapping the Moral Domain, she and her co-authors changed this to "gender related." They explained that both men and women can use either way of thinking when facing moral problems.

Theater Work

In 1991, Gilligan and Kristin Linklater started an all-female theater group called the Company of Women. Gilligan also took acting workshops. Her work in theater helped her understand the idea of "voice" even more deeply.

In 2002, Gilligan released a play based on the book The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her son, Jonathan Gilligan, helped her write it. The play first opened in Massachusetts. Gilligan used the play to share her ideas about how society's rules can prevent true happiness in relationships. She believed that even after big changes, the struggle between strict society and love continues.

Gilligan's Theories: Ethics of Care vs. Ethics of Justice

In her book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan introduced her ethics of care theory. This was an alternative to Lawrence Kohlberg's ideas about moral development. Kohlberg had suggested that girls and women did not reach the highest levels of moral thinking. Gilligan argued that women simply approached moral problems in a different way than men.

According to Gilligan, women often think about moral issues by focusing on responsibilities and relationships. Men, however, tend to focus more on fairness, rights, and rules. Women often see moral problems as a conflict between different responsibilities. Men might see them as a conflict between competing rights. So, women might see a situation as more complex and personal, while men might see it as more formal and abstract.

In a later article, Gilligan explained her key idea about care ethics. She said that in a traditional, male-dominated society, care is seen as a "feminine" way of thinking. But in a fair, democratic society, care is a "human" way of thinking. She believes that a feminist approach to care combines reason with feelings, mind with body, and self with relationships. This helps to break down old divisions that keep a male-dominated order in place. She calls these two different moral approaches "ethics of care" and "ethics of justice." She sees them as very different ways of thinking.

Awards and Honors

• 1984: Ms. Woman of the Year
• 1992: Grawemeyer Award for her work in education
• 1996: Time magazine's 25 most influential people in the United States
• 1998: Heinz Award for helping us understand the human condition
• Senior Research Scholar Award from the Spencer Foundation

Honorary Degrees

Carol Gilligan has received special degrees from many colleges and universities:

• Regis College, 1983
• Swarthmore College, 1985
• Haverford College, 1987
• Fitchburg State College, 1989
• Wesleyan University, 1992
• Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, 1996
• Northeastern University, 1997
• Smith College, 1999
• University of Haifa, 2006
• John Jay College, 2006
• Mount Holyoke, 2008

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See also

In Spanish: Carol Gilligan para niños