Carol Gilligan Quotes & Sayings

Theory can blind observation. — Carol Gilligan

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. — Carol Gilligan

Pleasure is a sensation. It is written into our bodies; it is our experience of delight, of joy ... Pleasure will become a marker, a compass pointing to emotional true north. — Carol Gilligan

Both love and democracy depend on voice
having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard. — Carol Gilligan

I've found that if I say what I'm really thinking and feeling, people are more likely to say what they really think and feel. The conversation becomes a real conversation. — Carol Gilligan

The studies of women's lives over time portray the role of crisis in transition and underline the possibilities for growth and despair that lie in the recognition of defeat. The studies of Betty and Sarah elucidate the transitions in the development of an ethic of care. The shifts in concern from survival to goodness and from goodness to truth are elaborated through time in these two women's lives. Both studies illustrate the potential of crisis to break a cycle of repetition and suggest that crisis itself may signal a return to a missed opportunity for growth. These portraits of transition are followed by depictions of despair, illustrations of moral nihilism in women who could find no answer to the question "why care? — Carol Gilligan

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

For a man to be a man, did he have to be a soldier, or at least prepare himself for war? For a woman to be a woman, did she have to be a mother, or at least prepare herself to raise children? Soldiers and mothers were the sacrificial couple, honored by statues in the park, lauded for their willingness to give their lives to others. — Carol Gilligan

While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equality - that everyone should be treated the same - an ethic of care rests on the premise of nonviolence - that no one should be hurt. — Carol Gilligan

... 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). — Carol Gilligan

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

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? — Carol Gilligan

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. — Carol Gilligan

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. — Carol Gilligan

Certain issues have been associated with contemporary feminism and in a certain sense circumscribed for that reason. — Carol Gilligan

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

I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy. — Carol Gilligan

Speaking and listening are a form of psychic breathing. — Carol Gilligan

Trust grows when babies and mothers establish that they can find each other again after the inevitable moments of losing touch. It is not the goodness of the mother or the relationship per se that is the basis for trust; it is the ability of mother and baby together to repair the breaks in their relationship that builds a safe house for love. — Carol Gilligan

My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. Because these languages share an overlapping moral vocabulary, they contain a propensity for systematic mistranslation ... — Carol Gilligan

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. — Carol Gilligan

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

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. — Carol Gilligan

Everything about women is in perpetual crisis. — Carol Gilligan

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. — Carol Gilligan

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

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. — Carol Gilligan

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. — Carol Gilligan