In A Human Voice

On Saturday, November 4, Carol Gilligan, PhD, discusses her recent book, In A Human Voice. The presentation will be followed by a book signing. Limited copies are available for purchase, below.

Carol Gilligan's landmark book In A Different Voice brought women’s voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time. Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn’t quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the “different voice” (of care ethics), although initially heard as a “feminine” voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story. With this clarification, it becomes evident why In A Human Voice continues to resonate strongly with people’s experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.

Carol Gilligan, PhD, is University Professor at New York University and the author of many works, including In a Different Voice, Meeting at the Crossroads (with Lyn Mikel Brown), The Birth of Pleasure, Joining the Resistance, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (with Naomi Snider), and Darkness Now Visible (with David A. J. Richards). For more than 30 years she was a lecturer at Harvard University, and held the university’s first chair in Gender Studies. In 1996, Time Magazine named her one of America’s 25 most influential people.