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In a Human Voice
Carol Gilligan’s landmark book In a Different Voice – the “little book that started a revolution” – brought women’s voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time. Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn’t quite be seen or said at the time of the original that the “different voice” (of care ethics), although initially heard as a “feminine” voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about it is a human story. With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people’s experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.
144 pages, Hardcover
Published September 18, 2023
28 people are currently reading
253 people want to read
About the author
Carol Gilligan
51 books213 followersCarol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 14, 2025
J’ai découvert l’autrice et psychologue Carol Gilligan dans un épisode récent du podcast Folie douce de Lauren Bastide. Elle y parlait notamment de son best-seller In a Different Voice, publié en 1982 et qui a semble-t-il révolutionné la psychologie féministe, et de son dernier livre In a Human Voice, publié en 2023 et qui revient plus de quarante ans après sur le sujet de son premier succès.
Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice – the “little book that started a revolution” – brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time.
Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the “different voice” (of care ethics), although initially heard as a “feminine” voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story.
With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people's experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.
L’entretien que Carol Gilligan avait accordé à Lauren Bastide m’avait donné envie de lire à la fois In a Different Voice, son succès de 1982, et In a Human Voice, le livre qui en est le prolongement quatre décennies plus tard. J’ai évidemment commencé par le plus ancien, mais j’ai eu beaucoup de mal avec ce livre. Le texte était peut-être trop pointu pour moi, le style trop aride, j’en ai en tout cas abandonné la lecture après quelques chapitres.
Cependant, comme le sujet m’intéressait et que j’avais senti dans le podcast de Laurent Bastide que l’autrice avait des choses vraiment intéressantes à dire, j’ai voulu insister et je me suis plongé dans In a Human Voice. Je ne le regrette pas, car c’est un livre passionnant, voire bouleversant, sur la souffrance psychique que subissent les filles puis les femmes, mais aussi les garçons puis les hommes, dans le système patriarcal.
J’ai apprécié que l’autrice fasse une sorte d’auto-critique ou en tout cas de relecture critique de son premier livre, en tenant compte des remarques que celui-ci a suscité depuis sa sortie. Il y a notamment cet extrait qui reconnait les limites du premier livre et le complète parfaitement :
From the vantage point of the present, then, it has become possible for me to clarify and articulate what couldn’t quite be seen or said at the time when my work was first published: that the “different voice” (the voice of care ethics), although initially heard as a “feminine” voice, is in fact a human voice, that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (listen for the tell-tale gender binaries and hierarchies), and that where patriarchy is in force and enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. With this theoretical clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people’s experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the twenty-first century.
En tant qu’homme, j’ai également été touché quand l’autrice aborde à plusieurs reprises la question de l’éducation des garçons et de leur "initiation" au patriarcat :
By undercutting human relational capabilities, the initiation into patriarchy compromises children’s ability to survive and to thrive. It also lays the ground for all forms of oppression, whether on the basis of race, class, caste, sexuality, religion, or what have you. This is because children’s internalization of gender codes, which require them to dissociate themselves from aspects of their humanity, clouds their ability to perceive and to resist injustice.
By following a group of 4- and 5-year-olds as they move from prekindergarten through kindergarten and into first grade, Chu saw children who had been attentive, articulate, authentic, and direct in their relationships with one another and with her gradually becoming more inarticulate, more inattentive, more inauthentic, and indirect with one another and with her. They were becoming “boys,” or how boys are often said to be. But, as Chu cautions, boys know more than they show.10 Chu was tracking a process of initiation whereby children, in their desire to establish themselves as boys, were putting on a cloak of masculinity. They were disguising themselves by shielding those aspects of themselves that would lead them to be seen as not masculine (meaning feminine) or as like a woman (girly or gay), in a world where being a man means being superior.
A picture was settling into place of an initiation that begins with young boys, roughly between the ages of 4 and 7, continues with girls when they reach adolescence (roughly between 11 and 14), and then replays with boys in the late years of high school, when, in the words of one of the boys in Way’s studies, they “know how to be more of a man.”11 An initiation that mandates dissociation and compromises children’s relational capacities – an initiation that leaves a psychological scar.
The initiation begins with boys. In When Boys Become Boys – the first panel of the triptych – Judy Chu records what she came to know by listening to 4- and 5-year-old boys. She saw evidence of boys’ resistance to becoming a “boy” in their strategic concealment of their empathy and desire for closeness. Chu observes that the very relational capacities boys learn to shield in becoming a “boy,” the empathy and emotional sensitivity that enable them to read the human world around them so accurately and so astutely, are essential if they are to realize the closeness they now seek with other boys. Yet in blunting or concealing these capacities in order to establish themselves as one of the boys, they render that closeness unattainable.
Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice – the “little book that started a revolution” – brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time.
Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the “different voice” (of care ethics), although initially heard as a “feminine” voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story.
With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people's experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.
L’entretien que Carol Gilligan avait accordé à Lauren Bastide m’avait donné envie de lire à la fois In a Different Voice, son succès de 1982, et In a Human Voice, le livre qui en est le prolongement quatre décennies plus tard. J’ai évidemment commencé par le plus ancien, mais j’ai eu beaucoup de mal avec ce livre. Le texte était peut-être trop pointu pour moi, le style trop aride, j’en ai en tout cas abandonné la lecture après quelques chapitres.
Cependant, comme le sujet m’intéressait et que j’avais senti dans le podcast de Laurent Bastide que l’autrice avait des choses vraiment intéressantes à dire, j’ai voulu insister et je me suis plongé dans In a Human Voice. Je ne le regrette pas, car c’est un livre passionnant, voire bouleversant, sur la souffrance psychique que subissent les filles puis les femmes, mais aussi les garçons puis les hommes, dans le système patriarcal.
J’ai apprécié que l’autrice fasse une sorte d’auto-critique ou en tout cas de relecture critique de son premier livre, en tenant compte des remarques que celui-ci a suscité depuis sa sortie. Il y a notamment cet extrait qui reconnait les limites du premier livre et le complète parfaitement :
From the vantage point of the present, then, it has become possible for me to clarify and articulate what couldn’t quite be seen or said at the time when my work was first published: that the “different voice” (the voice of care ethics), although initially heard as a “feminine” voice, is in fact a human voice, that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (listen for the tell-tale gender binaries and hierarchies), and that where patriarchy is in force and enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. With this theoretical clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people’s experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the twenty-first century.
En tant qu’homme, j’ai également été touché quand l’autrice aborde à plusieurs reprises la question de l’éducation des garçons et de leur "initiation" au patriarcat :
By undercutting human relational capabilities, the initiation into patriarchy compromises children’s ability to survive and to thrive. It also lays the ground for all forms of oppression, whether on the basis of race, class, caste, sexuality, religion, or what have you. This is because children’s internalization of gender codes, which require them to dissociate themselves from aspects of their humanity, clouds their ability to perceive and to resist injustice.
By following a group of 4- and 5-year-olds as they move from prekindergarten through kindergarten and into first grade, Chu saw children who had been attentive, articulate, authentic, and direct in their relationships with one another and with her gradually becoming more inarticulate, more inattentive, more inauthentic, and indirect with one another and with her. They were becoming “boys,” or how boys are often said to be. But, as Chu cautions, boys know more than they show.10 Chu was tracking a process of initiation whereby children, in their desire to establish themselves as boys, were putting on a cloak of masculinity. They were disguising themselves by shielding those aspects of themselves that would lead them to be seen as not masculine (meaning feminine) or as like a woman (girly or gay), in a world where being a man means being superior.
A picture was settling into place of an initiation that begins with young boys, roughly between the ages of 4 and 7, continues with girls when they reach adolescence (roughly between 11 and 14), and then replays with boys in the late years of high school, when, in the words of one of the boys in Way’s studies, they “know how to be more of a man.”11 An initiation that mandates dissociation and compromises children’s relational capacities – an initiation that leaves a psychological scar.
The initiation begins with boys. In When Boys Become Boys – the first panel of the triptych – Judy Chu records what she came to know by listening to 4- and 5-year-old boys. She saw evidence of boys’ resistance to becoming a “boy” in their strategic concealment of their empathy and desire for closeness. Chu observes that the very relational capacities boys learn to shield in becoming a “boy,” the empathy and emotional sensitivity that enable them to read the human world around them so accurately and so astutely, are essential if they are to realize the closeness they now seek with other boys. Yet in blunting or concealing these capacities in order to establish themselves as one of the boys, they render that closeness unattainable.
March 5, 2025
Go off queen
December 24, 2023
I was given this little book by a relative who found it spoke to her. It is a thoughtful book and contains some interesting insights into what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society.
May 15, 2024
A thoughtful and insightful update to Gilligan's original work. Well worth reading - and very timely as she incorporates reflections on recent events such as the US Dobbs decision.
August 10, 2024
Men silenced women. It was just the standard practice, the initial system setting, for a very long time. Gilligan doesn't mention it, but I remember Joseph Campbell voicing the speculation that men were jealous of the baby-making powers, next to which our Promethean technology is merely the boyish rubbing together of sticks. The first societies were likely matriarchal, and more equal; patriarchy came second, full of hierarchies, and in fact a complex game of domination and subordination, because the baby-power still belongs to the female, even as the male tries to render her chattel in his economy, his making of the earth into marketplace, smashing and snatching 'every creeping thing that creepeth.'
The voice that asks what use you are, that evaluates you and sends you to wherever the market will bear, whatever the system dictates, is the voice of patriarchy. You got to follow the market. I don't make the rules, I just work here. I didn't want to kill those guys, but we're soldiers, so...I mean, we're supposed to listen to the commanders. They said it was a good kill, they said it saved lives.
Sometimes you can hear a genuine voice beneath and contrary to what you say and do. "This is not right." "I know what's right." "I don't care what anybody else says." "I care deeply for these people." To not care what others say, sometimes, and also to care deeply for certain people, all of the time, are part of a balanced ethics of care. The moral of the story, "The Emperor's New Clothes," is that all the adults deceived themselves, or cared more what about what others said when they should have been paying attention to what they knew based on their own signal processing system. It takes a child, at the end of the story, to point out the truth, which is that they'd all been had (don't forget, this is a scam organized by two thieves who pretend to dress the Emperor in very fine custom-designed clothes):
On re-read, I see the ending as a systems-level process. All the elements are transmitting a lie to each other, but when the child, who either does not hear this signal or does not care, forms his own impression of the signal and sends message out that the Emperor has nothing at all on, the first receiver of the message immediately repeats it, which represents amplification. Then come the whispers, which represent the new message traveling through the nodes in the system, turning the proposition "the Emperor has clothes on" from "true" to "false" states in each node. At last, the whole system rejects the proposition. But I also forgot there is no happy ending here. The "show" must go on, decides the Emperor.
I used to think this was a story about not being scammed. And it is. But I now interpret this as a warning against "Emperor" level rank for anyone. It's just not a great choice for the whole system to go with one voice, no matter the conditions or concerns of the other voices.
What we need are strategies to be like the child, to listen to themis, the feeling of moral truth that won't go away. There could be a Jane Eyre Prize, for example -- awarded to any human, child or otherwise, who spots sources of moral injury, and calls attention loudly to said fact. I discovered there is an award sort of like that: the Right Livelihood Award. Great Thunberg has won it.
Gilligan's essential thesis here is that we can all dig deep and find our inner Great Thunbergs. It behooves us to do so, for there are more than two thieves filling up the whole system with deceit.
(My rating is 5 stars for content, but 2 stars on writing style. Prof. Gilligan commits an unforced, yet near-fatal error, in writing primarily about her previous work and conversations, when a summative manifesto of what our needs, and how we can meet them, would have made her thoughts available to a larger readership. Perhaps its a case of, Socrates needs his Plato?)
The voice that asks what use you are, that evaluates you and sends you to wherever the market will bear, whatever the system dictates, is the voice of patriarchy. You got to follow the market. I don't make the rules, I just work here. I didn't want to kill those guys, but we're soldiers, so...I mean, we're supposed to listen to the commanders. They said it was a good kill, they said it saved lives.
Sometimes you can hear a genuine voice beneath and contrary to what you say and do. "This is not right." "I know what's right." "I don't care what anybody else says." "I care deeply for these people." To not care what others say, sometimes, and also to care deeply for certain people, all of the time, are part of a balanced ethics of care. The moral of the story, "The Emperor's New Clothes," is that all the adults deceived themselves, or cared more what about what others said when they should have been paying attention to what they knew based on their own signal processing system. It takes a child, at the end of the story, to point out the truth, which is that they'd all been had (don't forget, this is a scam organized by two thieves who pretend to dress the Emperor in very fine custom-designed clothes):
“But the Emperor has nothing at all on!” said a little child. “Listen to the voice of the child!” exclaimed his father. What the child had said was whispered from one to another. “But he has nothing at all on!” at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was upset, for he knew that the people were right. However, he thought the procession must go on now! The lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold, and the Emperor walked on in his underwear.
On re-read, I see the ending as a systems-level process. All the elements are transmitting a lie to each other, but when the child, who either does not hear this signal or does not care, forms his own impression of the signal and sends message out that the Emperor has nothing at all on, the first receiver of the message immediately repeats it, which represents amplification. Then come the whispers, which represent the new message traveling through the nodes in the system, turning the proposition "the Emperor has clothes on" from "true" to "false" states in each node. At last, the whole system rejects the proposition. But I also forgot there is no happy ending here. The "show" must go on, decides the Emperor.
I used to think this was a story about not being scammed. And it is. But I now interpret this as a warning against "Emperor" level rank for anyone. It's just not a great choice for the whole system to go with one voice, no matter the conditions or concerns of the other voices.
What we need are strategies to be like the child, to listen to themis, the feeling of moral truth that won't go away. There could be a Jane Eyre Prize, for example -- awarded to any human, child or otherwise, who spots sources of moral injury, and calls attention loudly to said fact. I discovered there is an award sort of like that: the Right Livelihood Award. Great Thunberg has won it.
Gilligan's essential thesis here is that we can all dig deep and find our inner Great Thunbergs. It behooves us to do so, for there are more than two thieves filling up the whole system with deceit.
(My rating is 5 stars for content, but 2 stars on writing style. Prof. Gilligan commits an unforced, yet near-fatal error, in writing primarily about her previous work and conversations, when a summative manifesto of what our needs, and how we can meet them, would have made her thoughts available to a larger readership. Perhaps its a case of, Socrates needs his Plato?)
October 20, 2024
A very hopeful update on the ground-breaking insights of Gilligan's vital "In a Different Voice". Hopeful because she comes to extend the world-saving voice that she identified and discussed in the previous book no longer just with women, but with any human capable of feeling and showing care and compassion; which feasible extension is just as well, given that fifty per cent of the hominids crowding planet Earth are men.
That said, she also makes it clear why she was initially inclined to sex the voice, as women, for good reason, discover they embody it more "naturally" than men do. Nonetheless, as she establishes, patriarchalism is, finally, cultural choice not fate, and, with some encouragement (and self-encouragement), men are not debarred from despising it and conducting themselves and their politics accordingly.
Not to be read without having first read "In a Different Voice", I'd suggest.
That said, she also makes it clear why she was initially inclined to sex the voice, as women, for good reason, discover they embody it more "naturally" than men do. Nonetheless, as she establishes, patriarchalism is, finally, cultural choice not fate, and, with some encouragement (and self-encouragement), men are not debarred from despising it and conducting themselves and their politics accordingly.
Not to be read without having first read "In a Different Voice", I'd suggest.
November 19, 2025
When I read In a Different Voice, the big thing that I didn't vibe with was the inadvertently essentialising way the author wrote about gender. This book, coming more than 40 years later, is a much-needed update that identifies the "different" voice as a human rather than feminine one. It's much more reflective in tone and content - using as many novels and films as psychological studies - and feels more like an outright feminist manifesto against the patriarchy compared to the 1982 book. I found it compelling.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews