reading questions for

Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice

Chapter 1

• What are Gilligan's claims about "objective" theories of development?
• What problem does Gilligan identify with Strunk & White's examples?
• What is Gilligan's critique of Freud?
• "Thus a problem in theory became cast as a problem in women's development ..." Explain.
• What is Chodorow's explanation for the nearly universal differences between men and women's social roles?
• What is the "positive" account of early female development that Chodorow offers to replace Freud's?
• What differences did Lever find in the ways that boys & girls played together? What are her hypotheses about the causes of these differences?
• Why, according to Lever, Piaget, and Kohlberg, would girls' tendency to end a game before a quarrel broke out lead to difficulties in developing a "moral sense"?
• Chart the ways in which male development is the model for Erikson, and the corresponding ways that females are ignored.
• How are identity and intimacy linked for women in Bettelheim's analyses of fairy tales?
• What is the TAT and how is it used as a personality test?
• What is "fear of success"?
• What is Sassen's explanation of "fear of success"? Under what conditions does she predict it will occur for women?
• What is the "paradox" that Gilligan identifies about women's "good" attributes and their moral development?
• Why does Gilligan want to construct a model of moral judgment based on "the activity of care"?
• Why, according to Gilligan, would a man be concerned about people interfering with others' right while a woman would be concerned about harm caused by omission?
• Why would a morality of rights be frightening to women?
• Why would a morality of responsibility appear to be inconclusive and diffuse to men?

Chapter 2

• Why does Freud's theory lead him to declare women's psychology a "dark continent"?
• Why does Jake locate truth in math? Why does he think that anyone who follows his logic will agree with him?
• Why does Amy "misconstrue" the moral dilemma in the Heinz story?
• What different ways of mediating the Heinz conflict do Amy and Jake see?
• Amy is "answering a different question from the one the interviewer thought had been posed." Why does Amy persist in her way of answering?
• "What does Jake see that Amy does not?" and "What does Amy see that Jake does not?"
• Make an argument that both Jake and Amy are equally sophisticated in their understanding of the Heinz dilemma.
• "... Jeffrey thinks about what goes first, Karen focuses on who is left out." Why this difference?
• Why does Gilligan's claim that "in neither comparison does one child's judgment appear as a precursor of the other's position" important to her rejection that the girl is "less developed" than the boy?
• What are the differences in defining the self through separation and through connection? Why is the latter more "female" and more likely to seem "less developed?"
• How does constructing the conflict between responsibility to self and to others as "an act of care" differ from constructing it as "the restraint of aggression." Give examples from Jake and Amy.
• "She, assuming connection, [explores separation], while he, assuming separation [explores connection]." Why does this difference occur and what effect does it have on Amy & Jake's understanding of responsibility to self and others?
• How can Freud's complaint about "narcissism" in young women be turned into a "new responsiveness to the self"?
• What differences in themes of violence did men & women perceive in the TAT studies Gilligan reports? What is Gilligan's explanation for these differences?
• How does Freud build his model of Ego on "separation"? How does this ignore women's development?
• How is Claire caught between what she perceive as "right" and as "right for me"?
• How does Claire reconcile "responsiveness to others" and "responsiveness to herself"?
• Why did taking Kohlberg's course on moral development make her exclaim "My God, what if I have regressed?" when presented the opportunity to answer the dilemmas again?
• How is Claire's despair related to her experience of disconnection?
• Explain the "contextual" nature of Claire's struggle while working at an abortion clinic. Why was she "constantly torn"?
• In what way is Claire's drama of "Mr. Right" and "Mr. Wrong" a playing out of her struggle to be honest with herself and her feelings of what others expected?
• Why is "the act of assertion an act not of aggression but rather of communication"? State this in Claire's specific problem.
• "... each image marks as dangerous the place which the other defines as safe." What are the different assumptions and modes of response inherent in these different images?

Chapter 3

• The "unwillingness to make moral judgments" in adolescent men takes the form of calling into question morality itself. What form does it take in adolescent women?
• How do women "excuse themselves from the responsibility that decision entails"?
• The moral judgments of women differ from [those] of men in the extent to which they are tied to... ?
• Why is birth control and abortion an important area to study women's moral choices?
• What is the "conflict between compassion and autonomy, between virtue and power"?
• Describe the methodology of the "abortion decision" study.
• Do you think that the "abortion decision" study was ethical?
• According to Kohlberg, what is "conventional" morality and what are the differences between pre & post conventional moral reasoning?
• How does constructing the abortion decision as a problem of care make women's judgment appear in Kohlberg's system?
• Outline the "sequence in the development of the ethic of care" that Gilligan proposes on page 74.
• "for her, the question of rightness would emerge only if her own needs were in conflict..." What level in the ethic of care does this represent?
• How does pregnancy highlight the issue of connection to others?
• How does the "conception of a self that includes the possibility for doing 'the right thing' " signal an enhancement of self-worth?
• "The conventional feminine voice" defines the self on the basis of what?
• What is a strength and a limitation of this conventional feminine position?
• How does Cathy describe the "impossible task of choosing the victim"?
• What does the appearance of the word "selfish" signal?
• How is honesty incorporated into the conventional feminine voice?
• How is "paying attention to one's own need" honest? Why does Gilligan say it is also "fair"?
• In what way does the transition beyond the conventional women's voice hinge on self-concept?
• In what way does Ruth construe the "conflict between femininity and adulthood as a moral problem"?
• What are the differences between Ned's statement that "if you want other people not to interfere ... you have to play the game" and Diane's statement that a moral issue involves asking "are you taking care of all the things that are important"?
• What does Gilligan mean by " development for both sexes entails ... the discovery of the complementarity of these disparate views?
• How does the deference of the conventional feminine perspective continue at the postconventional level?
• What is Erikson's criticism of Gandhi's treatment of his family, and how does it reinforce Gilligan's viewpoint?

Chapter 4

• What dramatic changes occurred in women's thinking at the "time that the baby would have been born, had the pregnancy continued"?
• In what way does Sarah's decision to "take responsibility for ending this life" involve taking responsibility for herself as well?
• Look up the word "nihilism." How does "moral nihilism" describe the conclusion of women "who seek, in having an abortion, to cut off their feelings and not care"?
• How is this nihilism a "retreat ... to ... survival"? Does this mean that people can regress in Gilligan's system?

Chapter 5

• Why did Mary Wollstonecraft have to argue that liberty for women was "the mother of virtue"? What was the structure of her argument?
• What did Elizibeth Stanton mean by "Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice"?
• In what ways do "The Mill on the Floss" and "The Waterfall" resemble and differ from each other? Do the decisions of the heroines in each novel fit into one of Gilligan's stages?
• Why does the accusation of selfishness have "enormous power" for women?
• Why does Nan think that "the word selfish is tricky"?
• In what way did Jenny, five years after her family crisis, see that "selfishness" and "morality" were not opposed to each other?
• Why do women rights "season mercy with justice by enabling women to consider it moral to care ... for themselves"?

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