Carol Gilligan, an American psychologist, is known for her work on moral development in women. She developed a theory based on interviews with women considering abortion and men considering fighting in Vietnam. Her theory consisted of three levels, with the most sophisticated valuing truth and self-sacrifice. Gilligan’s work encouraged psychology to include women and girls in studies and theories. She is considered the founder of difference feminism, which argues that women think, feel, and behave differently from men.
American psychologist Carol Gilligan was born in 1936 to a lawyer and a teacher. Although her degree was in English literature, she went on to pursue a master’s degree in clinical psychology and a doctorate in social psychology. Gilligan began his career at Harvard in 1967, teaching alongside Erik Erikson, one of the best-known developmental psychologists.
Carol Gilligan is best known for her work on moral development in girls and women. Based on interviews of women deciding whether to have an abortion and men considering fighting in the Vietnam War, Gilligan developed a theory about how women’s stages of moral development differed from men’s. Her theories were published in her 1982 book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development.
Gilligan’s theory of moral development in women and girls consisted of three levels. In the first level, moral reasoning is based entirely on what is best for oneself. A girl or woman in the second stage, on the other hand, makes decisions based on a sense of goodness and self-sacrifice. The third and most sophisticated stage of female moral reasoning, Gilligan argued, valued truth as well as self-sacrifice; in this stage, women are able to think about the consequences and impact that their actions have on others.
Carol Gilligan’s stages of moral reasoning are very similar to Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. Gilligan worked closely with Kohlberg in the 1970s as his research assistant. Based on the work she did with Kohlberg, Gilligan came up with her own theory of how girls and women developed moral reasoning. She argued that Kohlberg based her theory of her solely on interviews with white men and boys who were reasonably well off, basing her findings about him on a relatively small percentage of the population. Therefore, factors that play into the more sophisticated levels of moral reasoning in women, such as truthfulness and self-sacrifice, were considered inferior in Kohlberg’s model.
Because of her views that women were different from men, Carol Gilligan is considered the founder of difference feminism. Difference feminism argues that women think, feel, and behave differently from men, but because men are held to be the standard, what is normal for women is therefore considered inferior to what is normal for men. However, critics argue that Gilligan’s theory is unfounded, citing recent studies that find little or no difference in the way men and women think.
Whether or not her theory of female moral development is accurate, Carol Gilligan’s work has helped encourage the field of psychology to include women and girls in studies and theories.
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