Carol Gilligan > Quotes

“Caring requires paying attention, seeing, listening, responding with respect. Its logic is contextual, psychological. Care is a relational ethic, grounded in a premise of interdependence. But it is not selfless.”
― Carol Gilligan, Joining the Resistance

“Women's deference is rooted not only in their social subordination but also in the substance of their moral concern. Sensitivity to the needs of others and the assumption of responsibility for taking care lead women to attend to voices other than their own and to include in their judgement other points of view.”
― Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

“Living at once inside and outside the framework, Hester is able to see the frame.”
― Carol Gilligan

“This knotted dilemma lies at the center of women's development. How can girls both enter and stay outside of, be educated in and then try to change, what for millennia has been a man's world?”
― Carol Gilligan, Joining the Resistance

“Speaking and listening are a form of psychic breathing.”
― Carol Gilligan

“Hester, in the dark conclusion of Hawthorne's brooding novel, reassumes the Puritan mantle….Hawthorne thus captures the catch-22 of feminism: the very woman who is able to envision a new order of living is, by the same token, unable, since the passion that enables her also adulterates her in the eyes of the Puritans. Released from goodness, she is imprisoned in badness, within the framework of the puritanical order. But her mind is free to question the order.”
― Carol Gilligan, Joining the Resistance

“... I draw on the work of Piaget (1968) in identifying conflict as the harbinger of growth and also on the work of Erikson (1964) who, in charting development through crisis, demonstrates how a heightened vulnerability signals the emergence of a potential strength, creating a dangerous opportunity for growth, "a turning point for better or worse" (p. 139).”
― Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

“More than two millennia later….Hawthorne puts forward a similar vision: A woman must bring the 'new truth….in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness' (The Scarlet Letter p.241)….With the brilliant economy of the letter A, he demonstrates why this vision is doomed to failure. The very passion that renders a woman able to see through the "iron framework" of Puritanism also disables her by causing her to be seen in the eyes of the Puritans as an impure woman, a woman who has been adulterated. This double vision...at once frees and imprisons women.”
― Carol Gilligan

“Why is it that girls, who seem "more intelligent and livelier than boys of the same age; [who] go out more to meet the external world and at the same time form stronger [connections with people]," seem to become less intelligent and less lively when they reach adolescence?”
― Carol Gilligan

“Our ability to communicate our own feelings, and to pick up the feelings of others and thus to heal fractures in connection, threatens the structures of hierarchy. Feelings of empathy and tender compassion for another’s suffering or humanity make it difficult to maintain or justify inequality.”
― Carol Gilligan, Why Does Patriarchy Persist?

“The significant relationships of early adulthood are thus construed as the means to an end of individual achievement, and these "transitional figures" must be cast off or reconstructed following the realization of success. If in the process, however, they become, like Dido, an impediment to the fulfillment of the Dream, then the relationship must be renounced, "to allow the developmental process" to continue. This process is defined by Levinson explicitly as one of individuation: "throughout the life cycle, but especially in the key transition periods . . . the developmental process of individuation is going on." The process refers "to the changes in a person's relationships to himself and to the external world," the relationships that constitute his "Life Structure" (p. 195).

If in the course of "Becoming One's Own Man," this structure is discovered to be flawed and threatens the great expectations of the Dream, then in order to avert "serious Failure or Decline," the man must "break out" to salvage his Dream. This act of breaking out is consummated by a "marker event" of separation, such as "leaving his wife, quitting his job, or moving to another region" (p. 206). Thus the road to mid-life salvation runs through either achievement or separation.”
― Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

“It has a very happy ending,” the answerer replies. How does the myth of Cupid and Psyche end? Psyche and Cupid is a map of love and a story about the transformation of love that ends with freedom and the birth of a daughter named Pleasure. The mystery of love will never be unraveled. It’s one of the great mysteries of life. But by uncovering truths about love in an ancient story, by exposing a long-standing social and literary history that leaves a knot in the psyche and exploring this knotted place in our souls, I found a path leading to pleasure and discovered it is also a road to freedom.”
― Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure

“The studies of women's lives over time portray the role of crisis in transition and underline the possibilities for growth and despair that lie in the recognition of defeat. The studies of Betty and Sarah elucidate the transitions in the development of an ethic of care. The shifts in concern from survival to goodness and from goodness to truth are elaborated through time in these two women's lives. Both studies illustrate the potential of crisis to break a cycle of repetition and suggest that crisis itself may signal a return to a missed opportunity for growth. These portraits of transition are followed by depictions of despair, illustrations of moral nihilism in women who could find no answer to the question "why care?”
― Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

“to show how constructions of manhood and of womanhood can function to subvert the capacity to resist injustice in its many and intersectional forms.”
― Carol Gilligan, Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy's Resurgence and Feminist Resistance

“We need to understand how democratic peoples sometimes espouse what William ​James called in his own time American “stupidity and injustice,” arising from what he called an ethical “blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.”21”
― Carol Gilligan, Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy's Resurgence and Feminist Resistance