What is the status these days of Carol Gilligan’s most famous book “In A Different Voice” published in 1982 as a seminal and/or influential piece of social-psychological research? IIRC about a decade or so ago various objections were leveled at the work that it was essentially anecdotal, and in pushing Gilligan for the source data (which apparently she strongly resisted providing) it was determined that (effectively) no data existed.
Gilligan is still apparently a full fledged Professor so (I’m guessing) these objections must have been effectively answered or countered, but little is available on the web as to what the process of responding to these critics entitled and how these responses were judged by her academic peers. It just seems kind of a gray fuzz.
What actually happened? What’s the current opinion of her work in the academic, social-psychological science research community?
Probably not the answer you’re looking for, but I included it on my Sociology of Gender syllabus last summer. We discussed it as an example of a certain type of feminist scholarship. I’d say that in general feminist scholarship has evolved considerably since this was written.
a) Carol Gilligan, before she wrote her full-length book titled In a Different Voice, wrote an article-sized essay on the same subject. Of the two of them I found the latter more impressive. IADV the article [“In a Different Voice: Women’s Conceptions of Self and of Morality”] was first published in a compendium of articles titled The Naming of Difference (don’t have publisher & date handy, sorry); the book was In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development Harvard U Press 1982.
Anyway, the article did not assert definitive built-in differences in how men & women make moral decisions & whatnot. What it did do was posit the possibility of same in order to upend a fellow named Kohlberg, to whose writings she was responding, and in doing so made a point about unquestioned valorization of the (conventionally) male way of doing things and then turning around to conclude that lo and behold, the people who excel according to those standards are most often male!
I was no fly on the wall but I got the impression that it caught fire, she got advised to expand on it at substantial length, & either got encouraged to go a lot farther towards claiming that this hypothetical difference really did exist (and women’s way of being in the world is as good if not better), or else drifted in that direction herself.
b) In combo with Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand, it ushered in an era of examination of a ‘female way’ of communicating, valuing things, prioritizing stuff, and so forth, which in large part was read by the feminist community as yet more upending of unquestioned tendency to make the ‘male way’ of anything the norm and then find female people short of (tacitly male) standards of excellence; but which was increasingly read outside the feminist community as yet more information bolstering the notion that men and women are just plain different.
c) Typically, the person who finally ended up cashing in big on the whole trajectory was neither feminist nor female and definitely not nuanced: John Gray, ol’ Mr. Men are From Mars himself. Had little to add but said what he did say strictly as an assertion that men and women’s brains are just plain different. Very little attention to the cultural tendency to treat (observed-to-be) male behavior as the universally normative, and no sense of political, cultural, tactical, etc context, just blap! We’re different like so. Bestseller.
Found the cite on the article Here, her article was actually 1977 and was born with yet a different title “Concepts of the Self and of Morality”, HARVARD EDUCATIONAL REVIEW 47.4 (November 1977): 481-517.
I appreciate the thought, but it’s not you it’s just an obscure subject. The odd thing is in looking at the genesis of her article/book, how much of it is (in a roundabout way) an anecdotally based reply to the conceits of neo-Freudianism. It seems t be slipping into the category of feminist “reading” vs being an actual work of science.