Difference I
One day, late in the fall of 1975, Carol Gilligan sat down at her
dining room table with a pad of paper and wrote “In a Different
Voice” at the top of the first page. She was a thirty-nine-year-old
part-time assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
taking a year off to help settle her three sons in a new neighborhood.
Later she said she started writing that day “for no reason.” She
was speaking in exactly the same way that girls do when you ask them
what they’ve been doing on the edge of the playground during recess
while the boys have been playing pickup ball and chase and steal-the-hat
and the girls say, “Nothing.”
“The men whose theories have largely informed this understanding
of development have all been plagued by the same problem, the problem
of women, whose sexuality remains more diffuse, whose perception
of self is so much more tenaciously embedded in relationships with
others and whose moral dilemmas hold them in a mode of judgment
that is insistently contextual,” Carol wrote. “The solution has been to
consider women as either deviant or deficient in their development.”
But what-Carol asked, as she wrote on long yellow sheets in a
room looking out over a wide lawn filled with moss-footed beeches
planted a centrey before, a dining room walled with elegant paintings
of merchant ships and schooners, of men and boys fishing in an
eighteenth-century Dutch sea-what if the problem is not women?
What if the problem is the theories that say women are a problem?
In 1972, the year Nixon beat McGovern in a landslide, Gilligan began
asking men and women students at Harvard how they faced moral
conflicts. She had also decided to study young men forced to choose
whether or not to fight in Vietnam, a moral dilemma that was tipping
American families and the United States apart.
The war was so unpopular, and yet so many U.S. troops were
there-half a million at the peak-that you had to be involved. Either
you were fighting in Vietnam or you were fighting about Vietnam
somewhere else. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the songs on the radio-“Universal
Soldier,” John Lennon’s “Imagine”-were about putting
an end to war. The atmosphere was charged with antiwar feeling
and rang with the protesters’ chant “Hell, no! We won’t go!” Marches,
protests, rallies, sit-ins, and strikes pitted a civilian army of student war
resisters against an army of police in riot gear virtually every time you
turned on the TV news or picked up a newspaper.
Then, in 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court conceded to women the
power to make a moral decision as wrenching as the choice of whether
or not to go to war: whether or not to have an abortion. The Court’s decision
came after an intense nationwide struggle by women activists
that had already led to liberalization of abortion laws in California,
Colorado, and North Carolina in 1967 and to the repeal of New York’s
antiabortion law in 1970.
Gilligan, meanwhile, was planning her draft study and lining up
draft-age men to interview. But the draft ended before she could start
interviewing. So in 1974 she decided to study women who were in the
throes of deciding whether to have first-term abortions.
“I’m talking with pregnant women at a time when the Supreme
Court of this country has said that women can speak their thoughts
aloud, that women’s voices can guide women’s decisions, can be the decisive
voice. The women are battling the accusation of selfishness, the
threat that if they speak they will disrupt, they will lose relationships. Is
it selfish to listen to oneself rather than to others saying that to be a
good woman means to be without a self, to be selfless? What does that
mean? To be self-less? What is love? What is truth? What does it take
to sustain a life? What is the responsive-that is, the present, the
responsible-way to act at a time and place when there’s no way of acting
that will not cause hurt? What does it mean to act rightly or well in
a world that is intrinsically relational, where there’s no way of taking
even one step,” Carol tells a class of graduate students in 1995, “without
having the relational fabric shift under one’s weight?”
What is love?
What is truth?
You could say that all of Gilligan’s work-from “In a Different
Voice” to The Birth of Pleasure-has simply allowed into psychology all
the big questions she entered psychology to try to answer, because the
first thing they taught her when she started studying psychology at Harvard
was that those big questions were inappropriate. In fact, at the beginning
of her studies, not only were her questions inappropriate, but,
according to the head of the department, she herself was inappropriate.
In 1958, when Gilligan arrived at Harvard from Swarthmore for graduate
study, she recalls, “the head of my department announced, ‘We only
take women students to keep our junior faculty happy. They’re going to
have children and put their diplomas over the washing machine.’ I
thought, Well, I take your program about as seriously as you take me.”
His kind of bias was so common, so expected, that she was
nowhere near seeing it as a distortion that falsified all the psychology
she read and heard. She was working in a university that paid white
men to do research based on the assumption that they were at the top
of the economic and social pile because of hereditary mental superiority.
And these researchers were merely the latest to be rewarded for
shoring up a system that rewarded intelligence in people of one skin
color by making a theory that only found intelligence in people of one
skin color. Richard J. Herrnstein, who had a Ph.D. in psychology from
Harvard and finished a term as chairman of the Harvard psychology
department in 1971, ignored the continuing legacy of slavery, Jim
Crow, school segregation, redlining, and other forms of racism and focused
on I.Q. test results. “We do not know why blacks bunch towards
the lower end of the social scale, or, for that matter, why Jews bunch towards
the top,” he wrote, and went on to conclude, based mostly on
data about white men, that intelligence is 85 percent inherited and that
the political and social system rewards intelligence.
He and his colleagues were renowned as experts in manipulating
statistics and followed all the proper protocols for psychological research.
They had no training in political or social analysis, and their
work rested on the untested assumption that inherited intelligence-rather
than education, cronyism, luck, appearance, or the ability to
conform to a white male ideal-is the engine of social mobility. The
game is fair, and the winners have to be smarter than the losers. That
was their theory about intelligence, and there was a whole intellectual
tradition, with its own jargon and buzzwords like “eugenics” and
“progress,” that supported their theory.
But the civil rights movement had changed the rules-not yet of
playing the game, but of seeing and hearing the game. And the
women’s movement was giving women courage to speak. Herrnstein’s
book found a lot of white critics who just couldn’t swallow its psychometric
social Darwinism. In 1973, the year Herrnstein’s book I.Q. in
the Meritocracy came out, you couldn’t go to a dinner party in Cambridge
02138, the zip code that includes Harvard, among the academic
stars Herrnstein dubbed the best and the brightest, without seeing
somebody walk out screaming and slam the door, furious that a host or
a fellow guest could stomach Herrnstein’s ideas. Many of the door
slammers, it must be said, were white women-the people who raised
white men of superior rank, class, and intelligence that Herrnstein said
were simply smart by nature. Couples divorced over his book. For
some women, the discovery that their husbands actually believed that
their power and wealth came from merit based on natural endowment
was more than they could take. The argument was almost always about
African-Americans-few of whom, it also has to be said, were at those
tables. Banks and mortgage agencies had redlined black middle-class
people out of Boston’s white neighborhoods, suburbs, schools, and colleges,
and at the moment the city was inflamed by a bitter fight about
school busing to achieve integration. The fight showed an intensity of
race hatred that embarrassed dinner-table integrationists in a region
with a long history, of opposing slavery and legal segregation. But at
least in the courts and in the first round, integration won in the Boston
public schools. Affirmative action had only just begun to put talented
white people to work beside talented black colleagues whom the white
people might then invite to dinner. So, trendily dressed white people-in
jacket, tie, and jeans, or silk blouses and jeans, or cheap Indian silk
caftans-would eat their coq au vin and sip their grand cru wines,
almost
all still under ten dollars, and rant: How could Herrnstein add
insult to injury and call it science? Didn’t he read the newspaper?
Dismantling Jim Crow in the South and school desegregation in the
North were exposing generations of racist chicanery that amounted to a
national policy of preventing African-Americans from acquiring wealth.
How could Herrnstein imply that black people, so long oppressed and
so many of them still at the bottom of the economic and social heap,
were on the bottom because they were mentally inferior?
Few white women argued against Herrnstein from their own experience,
even though they had a very damning argument: If humans
were smart by inheritance, and intelligence was rewarded by merit in
the system, why did a white upper-middle-class woman’s brothers get
top corporate jobs while she ended up doing laundry and pouring all
her intelligence and ability into raising a white upper-middle-class
man’s sons and daughters? Herrnstein mentioned the huge difference
in status and earnings between white men and white women but made
nothing of it, noting only that one woman with an I.Q. of 192 had been
happy to be a housewife raising eight children in the 1950s.
One of the things that must have infuriated women about Herrnstein’s
thesis is that it made their work invisible. Many suburban Boston
schools still sent children home for lunch in 1973. Home was where
Mom was supposed to be waiting with soup-and with time to nurture
intelligence. Before kids started school, and after school, it was up to
white middle-class mothers to teach their kids, while Dad might not
get home from the office until after they were in bed. In school, most
teachers were women. Not only did Herrnstein’s book fail to account
for the very different way the “meritocracy” treated men and women
born of the same white middle-class parents; it failed to notice the incredible
amount of work women’s work-that went into educating
white middle-class men. And if this is how psychologists were researching
class and race differences, who noticed what they were doing about
gender? Though psychologists talked about their field as a body of
knowledge based on clinical and experimental observations of human
beings, they didn’t talk about their political program, their mission,
which was to use their observations to create a set of beliefs about who
was human and who was not quite human, who should rule and who
should be ruled. Fortunately, Carol Gilligan’s knowledge of two worlds,
and her sense of belonging more in the world that was not welcome at
Harvard University, protected her from caring too much about getting
ahead in a tacitly politicized field of psychology.
Most people who shift paradigms in science aren’t looking for what
they find, and Gilligan fits that description. But she wasn’t looking for
what she was supposed to be looking for, either. Again and again, when
I talk to her years and then decades later about what she was thinking
and feeling when she made her first discoveries, she uses metaphors of
water. It was as though the world she was about to bring psychology
into were a different element, a different medium for life, and she had
to be amphibious to survive in both worlds. Air was Sigmund Freud
and Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, the dead
and the living theory makers in her field who had set the terms of the
current debates in her brand of psychology, the psychology of human
development. And water was where she went when she listened to the
women and men she was studying. She found the lost treasure of
women’s voices underwater. Then she hid her knowledge about women
and girls there to keep it safe. “It was like I’d been holding the work on
women, which was the center of my work that touched me personally
most centrally, absolutely underwater,” she would say. Air was the thin
stuff she maintained herself on as she waited for the dry, nitpicky
process of tenure review to finish with her. And then, more than a
decade after she sat down and wrote “In a Different Voice,” she got
tenure and a dolphin existence, air breathing and yet joyously, stylishly
waterborne.
Certainly by 1975, her senior Harvard colleagues who knew what
she was doing regarded Gilligan’s work not as important or dangerous
but as trivial and irrelevant, at best a fad.
The fad was women.
Gilligan was a research psychologist working with women on
women’s development at maybe the best time for women’s rights in the
history of the United States. By 1975, the 1970s had already become famous
as a decade that was listening to women. Women’s activism-starting
with the Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970-had prodded
Congress into passing more laws to expand and protect women’s rights
than ever before. Even the Equal Rights Amendment had risen from
the dead. Though the amendment was drafted in 1923 and introduced
every year after that, Congress failed to report the ERA out of committee
for forty-seven years. But by 1972, both houses of Congress had
passed this ultimate protection of women’s rights with huge majorities.
By 1974, thirty-three of the thirty-eight states needed for ratification
had passed the ERA.
And that was it. The crest of the second wave of the women’s
movement rose and broke. Tennessee, whose legislature had made
women’s suffrage law by one vote in 1920, took back its ratification of
the ERA in 1974. In 1975, one more state ratified, but seven Southern
and Western states rejected the ERA, and Nebraska rescinded. In
1975, the second wave started to crash into backlash.
A liberal political oasis, Massachusetts tried to compensate. I remember
walking up to see what was going on at a table in Harvard
Square on a beautiful New England Indian summer day in 1975. A tall,
grinning, sandy-haired man in shirtsleeves began to lecture me about
why I should vote against the state ERA on the Massachusetts ballot.
“You already have equal rights. You don’t need an ERA,” he told me.
But most men did realize that women needed equal rights, and many
of them realized faster than women. A national Gallup poll taken in
1975 suggested that 63 percent of men and 54 percent of women favored
an equal rights amendment for women; in the East, 67 percent
of all respondents said they favored the ERA. The Massachusetts state
ERA passed in the legislature and by referendum and became law in
1976. The next day the place felt a little different. A friend of mine
walked down a narrow Boston sidewalk and saw a man making straight
toward her. “What do we do now?” she asked herself. “Bump?”
The 1970s were a bumpy ride for women and men. But since the
late 1960s, a political movement had cushioned women. Tens of thousands
of women met in places where they felt safe, usually their houses,
to talk about the politics of being women: too often these were the politics
of getting coffee, of getting jumped, of getting raped, of getting
confided in by bosses who would never promote them, or of getting left
out of the Western canon, the history of civilization, and the study of
psychology. Some of these meetings were consciousness-raising groups
where all kinds of women, not just professional thinkers, got together
to explore for themselves the political truths of their personal lives that
most social scientists ignored. But a few of them were groups of
women social scientists who were starting to go about their business in
the same way-by looking at good data they knew didn’t fit conventional
science and by asking questions they really wanted answered.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from This Changes Everything
by Christina Robb
Copyright © 2006 by Christina Robb.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2006
Christina Robb
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-374-27581-5
