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This Harvard professor tells Mr. Goldberg what she has learned from carefully listening to the voices of women and children.
CAROL GILLIGAN is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, the first holder of the Patricia Albjerg Graham Chair in Gender Studies at Harvard, and the author or co-author of four books and dozens of scholarly and popular articles. She is best known for her landmark book In a Different Voice, published in 1982 and still in print after selling nearly 600,000 copies in 12 languages. This book established that girls and women often approach moral decisions in a way that is different from what male researchers had identified as the "norm: ' It also established Gilligan's reputation, among both academics and the informed general public, as a significant researcher, feminist thinker, and psychologist.
In 1974, 10 years after Carol Gilligan received her Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, she was the mother of three young boys and the wife of a psychiatrist. She did not have, and wasn't certain she would have, a full-time academic career. She had taught courses at the University of Chicago and Harvard, had been a principal investigator in a couple of research studies, had published several articles, and had even done some research and teaching with Lawrence Kohlberg and Erik Erikson at Harvard. But she was not in a regular faculty position that would lead to a permanent appointment.
In fact, Gilligan spent a great deal of time in the late Sixties and early Seventies as a social activist. At the University of Chicago, where she taught a course while her husband completed his medical internship, she was "one of the faculty members who refused to submit grades because they were being used as a basis for the Vietnam draft." She participated in sit-ins and became "active in voter registration, the civil rights movement, the antinuclear movement, and the women's strike for peace." The important issue of how people make moral decisions harked back to Gilligan's doctoral work and continued to percolate in her daily life and thinking, but the subject was far from the center of any academic work that she was doing.
As an undergraduate at Swarthmore College in the middle and late...