Carol Gilligan

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Lore & Background

Carol Gilligan was raised in a Jewish family in New York City, the only child of a lawyer, William Friedman, and a nursery school teacher, Mabel Caminez. She attended the public Hunter Model School and the Walden School, a progressive private school on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and played piano. Gilligan received her B.A. summa cum laude in English literature from Swarthmore College, a master's degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College, and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation "Responses to Temptation: An Analysis of Motives." Disillusioned by academia, Gilligan left to pursue a career in modern dance. She began her teaching career as a lecturer at the University of Chicago from 1965 to 1966, teaching the Introduction to Modern Social Science. She then became a lecturer at Harvard University in 1967, lecturing on General Education. After becoming an assistant professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1971, she received tenure there in 1988 as a full professor. Gilligan taught for two years at the University of Cambridge (from 1992 to 1994) as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions and as a visiting professorial fellow in the Social and Political Sciences. In 1997, she became Patricia Albjerg Graham Chair in Gender Studies at Harvard. From 1998 until 2001, she was a Visiting Meyer Professor and later visiting professor at New York University School of Law. Gilligan and Kristin Linklater co-founded an all-female theater group called the Company of Women in 1991. Around this time, Gilligan attended a Shakespeare & Company workshop on acting. Her theater work led Tina Packer to ask Gilligan to draft a script for The Scarlet Letter. In early fall of 2002, Gilligan released a theater adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, originally written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with her son Jonathan Gilligan. The play first opened on September 14, 2002, at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. Gilligan eventually left Harvard in 2002 to join New York University as a full professor with the School of Education and the School of Law. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in the Centre for Gender Studies from 2003 until 2009. Gilligan is known for her work with Lawrence Kohlberg on his stages of moral development as well as her criticism of his approach. As his research assistant, Gilligan argued that Kohlberg's stages were male-oriented, which limited their ability to be generalized to females. She proposed her theory of stages of female moral development based on her idea of moral voices: the masculine voice is "logical and individualistic," emphasizing justice and rights, while the feminine voice places more emphasis on protecting interpersonal relationships and taking care of other people. Her book In a Different Voice (1982) criticized Kohlberg's stages and became a landmark work.

Reader's Guide

Carol Gilligan's significance lies in her foundational role in developing the ethics of care, a framework that challenged the male-centric assumptions in moral psychology. By critiquing Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development as biased toward a masculine voice emphasizing justice and individual rights, she introduced a feminine voice centered on interpersonal relationships and care. Her work highlighted that women's moral reasoning was not deficient but different, leading to a more inclusive understanding of ethical development. Gilligan's stages—pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional morality—emphasize a progression from self-interest to self-sacrifice to a balanced care for self and others. In 1996, Time magazine listed her among America's 25 most influential people. Her ideas have influenced feminist theory, psychology, and ethics. Her legacy continues through her teaching at New York University and her contributions to understanding gender and morality.

Did You Know?

• Gilligan's doctoral dissertation at Harvard was titled 'Responses to Temptation: An Analysis of Motives.'
• She co-founded an all-female theater group called the Company of Women in 1991 with Kristin Linklater.
• Her theater adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter' opened on September 14, 2002, at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts.
• In 1996, Time magazine listed her among America's 25 most influential people.
• Gilligan taught for a semester at New York University in Abu Dhabi in 2015.