Quotes from Carol Gilligan

The hardest times for me were not when people challenged what I said, but when I felt my voice was not heard.

Everything about women is in perpetual crisis.

Many women have told me they remember where they were when they read the book, and how they felt suddenly that what they really thought or felt about things made sense.

The women's movement is taking a different form right now, and it is because it has been so effective and so successful that there's a huge counter movement to try to stop it, to try to divide women from one another, to try to almost foment divisiveness.

Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows.

The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life.

It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve - a story which shows among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble.

At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered.

I find the question of whether gender differences are biologically determined or socially constructed to be deeply disturbing.

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.

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.

Living at once inside and outside the framework, Hester is able to see the frame.

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.

Speaking and listening are a form of psychic breathing.

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?

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).

to show how constructions of manhood and of womanhood can function to subvert the capacity to resist injustice in its many and intersectional forms.

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

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.

In the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection.

At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered.

While men represent powerful activity as assertion and aggression, women in contrast portray acts of nurturance as acts of strength.

In the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection.

Women have traditionally deferred to the judgment of men although often while intimating a sensibility of their own which is at variance with that judgment.