Those who have read On Our Best Behavior or this newsletter for a bit, know how much I admire Carol Gilligan, a psychologist who as far as I can tell is still teaching at NYU, even though she’s approaching 90. (She cameos in “The Achilles Heel of Women,” “How to Keep Caring,” “Why is it So Hard to Scream?”) She’s certainly still writing books, which are expansions of the piece of work that put her on the map in the ‘80s: In a Different Voice. It’s telling that the Harvard Educational Review rejected her original study multiple times because they didn’t know what it was or how to understand it. (It’s since gone on to become their #1 most-requested reprint, while In a Different Voice has sold more than 700,000 copies, which is staggering for an academic book.)
They didn’t know what Gilligan’s study was because at the time, all models of developmental psychology had been predicated on the minds of boys and men (thus the “different voice” was that of women and girls). It’s wild to think of this now, but there are remnants of this in our culture. After all, as Gilligan points out we still describe the symptoms of heart attack in women as “atypical,” even though heart disease is the #1 killer of women. Yes, you read that right.
Gilligan’s work is about a different type of heartbreak, it’s about the way that women and girls come to not say what they know (and eventually not know it as well). As she writes of the study in In a Different Voice:
It was like seeing under the surface or picking up the undercurrents of the human conversation: what is known, and then not known, felt but not spoken. Women’s choices not to speak or rather to dissociate themselves from what they themselves are saying can be deliberate or unwitting, consciously chosen or enacted through the body by narrowing the passages connecting the voice with breath and sound, by keeping the voice high in the head so that it does not carry the depths of human feelings or a mix of feelings and thoughts, or by changing voice, shifting to a more guarded or impersonal register or key. Choices not to speak are often well-intentioned and psychologically protective, motivated by concerns for people’s feelings and by an awareness of the realities of one’s own and others’ lives. And yet by restricting their voices, many women are wittingly or unwittingly perpetuating a male-voiced civilization and an order of living that is founded on disconnection from women.
Gilligan’s famous study was about the development of morality in children, like Lawrence Kohlberg, who did a foundational longitudinal study of seventy-two white boys of varied social classes that’s foundational in our cultural understanding of this concept. When it came to understanding justice, the center of the moral universe per Kohlberg and others, Gilligan found that boys centered individual rights (without impinging on the rights of others), while the girls centered relationship and care (how can you not help someone who needs help?). In short, the boys saw themselves as being in the world, while the girls saw themselves as being in service to the world. This is big, and I’m going to come back to this in coming newsletters, but one thing worth noting here is how we’ve coded and internalized what we’d call the “feminine values” of care, of “relationship” and “integration” as somehow regressive. There’s an insidious perception that girls and women are mired in a lower stage of development because they’re less focused on the “masculine values,” typically marked by “growth” and “individuation.” The theory, according to men like Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, is that girls don’t “separate” because they don’t want to lose relationship, and therefore they don’t progress up the ladder of psychological development. (Lots of square quotes here for a reason, I’ll be back in future newsletters to talk about the conflation of feminine and female, and masculine and male, and why that puts us in such a pickle.)
In one of Gilligan’s latest books, Why Does Patriarchy Persist?, which she co-wrote with Naomi Snider, they integrate the work Niobe Way does on boys into Gilligan’s study and arrive at a heartbreaking revelation that drives to the center of our biggest cultural woe: They remark that at a certain point in the social development of boys (at around age 7) and girls (at around age 11), the word “don’t” enters their vocabulary. For boys, it’s “I don’t care.” For girls, it’s “I don’t know.” I’ve written about this before, and it’s central in my book, because I do not think we can talk about this enough and its implications for all of us. Because of course boys do care, and of course girls do know—but this caring and knowing gets plastered over by our culture.
Two years ago, Gilligan published In a Human Voice, which is a follow-up, in part to offer a correction that no, the voices of girls and women are not “different,” they are actually human. And these values that we code as feminine belong to all of us as whole people—that an ethics of care, at which girls have historically excelled, is central to our survival and a piece of psychological development that must be prioritized for boys and men.
I’ll come back to this in the coming weeks, but for now, I want to leave you with some insights about this idea of knowing and voice that Gilligan so deftly studies and explores. In In a Human Voice, she writes of the evolution in her own thinking in the context of really listening to women and girls, explaining, “It was adolescent girls who taught me to listen for the words “really” and “actually” and to hear how they can signal a switch from saying what I think to saying what I really think, or how I actually feel. It was girls coming of age who showed me how a human voice goes undercover—how ‘I don’t know’ can become a cover for ‘I know.’” God, I love this. We all know that sensation when our voices drop and we lean forward to be…honest, rather than nice. It is in these moments that we break with patriarchy.
Here’s Gilligan again:
Studying girls, I became a witness to dissociation—a not knowing that was culturally inscribed and socially enforced. What I had learned to think of as steps in a developmental progression—the separation of reason from emotion, of the mind from the body, and the self from relationships—milestones on the march toward rationality, autonomy, and maturity, held this not knowing in place. Because if we cannot think about what we are feeling, if our mind doesn’t register what is going on in our body, and if our self becomes like a mighty fortress, defended and boundaried rather than open and engaged in relationships, then we cannot know what otherwise we would know. Because it is only when our thoughts and our emotions are connected, when our minds and our bodies are joined, and when we are living in relationship with others rather than standing apart from them, that we can make sense of the human world.
Wow.
Gilligan cites women like Virginia Woolf, who begins A Room of One’s Own anticipating disruption and interruption, “But, you may say,…” And she also cites bell hooks, who writes, “I was never taught absolute silence. I was taught that it was important to speak but to talk a talk that was itself a silence. Taught to speak and beware of the betrayal of too much heard speech. I experienced intense confusion and deep anxiety in my efforts to speak and to write.”
Gilligan spends the most time talking about the voices of children who have not yet been socialized out of their most honest perceptions.
This emotionally astute and honest voice is the voice of the 5-year-old who asks his mother, “Mama, why do you smile when you’re sad?,” the voice of the 5-year-old who tells his father, “You are afraid that if you hit me, when I grow up I’ll hit my children,” the voice of 11-year-old Elise who, in a conversation about whether it is ever good to lie, says, “My house is wallpapered with lies.” … These children give voice to what it has taken centuries for the human sciences to acknowledge: the human world is far more transparent than is commonly assumed. In essence, we learn not to see what is right in front of our eyes, not to know what in another sense is obvious.
I learned the word for this: agnosia.
And in the context of children, Gilligan spends a fair amount of time on Greta Thunberg, writing that, “Her Asperberger’s, she says, is her superpower, because it insulates her from the voices and pressures that might otherwise lead her to forget what she knows.” Gilligan continues:
Greta’s Asperberger’s may have insulated her from an initiation that in the name of goodness or for the sake of inclusion would have kept her from saying in this unadorned voice what is so patently, nakedly true. And my intention is not to romanticize Asperger’s syndrome, but rather to ask: Why has this voice found such resonance?
My answer is simple: because it is a voice we recognize, a human voice. At once familiar and surprising. A voice we know and then learned to dismiss as naïve or unpleasant. A voice that puts us on edge, in part because it leads us to question losses we may have justified as necessary and to revisit sacrifices we may have made in the name of manhood or honor or becoming a good woman, or for the sake of having relationships and keeping the peace and making our way in the world. In a world where, to be a man, a man must blind himself to his vulnerability and a woman must act as though she is selfless and has no voice of her own, the human voice is a voice of resistance.
The human voice is a voice of resistance.
This section puts a point on my podcast conversation with Mattie Kahn, who wrote Young and Restless, which is about the teenage girls who have sparked so many of our social revolutions. Kahn points out that there’s something entrancing about precocious girls—but as they age, we lose interest. After all, we have little appetite for angry women—I have much to say about this in the Anger chapter in On Our Best Behavior)
I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of “really” and “actually” as a cover for my own knowing in the time since reading Gilligan’s latest book—and listening for it in conversation with other women. You won’t be surprised at how frequently it surfaces, how friends will let you know what they “really think” if pushed, often in hushed tones, hinged forward at the waste. The word “honestly” is another clue.
A friend tipped me off to another step in this process of acculturation that seems to be related. She shared that when she was young, her parents would constantly ask her, Are you sure? This was their response when she would pick something off a menu, for example, and its long-term effect has been to erode her sense of knowing what she wants. It’s a stunning and simple revelation, as I think we can all relate: Their question was really, after all, more of a statement. Your choice is not right, your instincts might be strange, turn off your own knowing and listen to me instead. You can’t rely on yourself. The stakes may seem low, but this is the beginning of disembodiment, a disembodiment to which we can all relate.
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
5/2: On loving the end with Alua Arthur
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4/25: On telling the Truth with Nell Irvin Painter
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4/18: Hitting the road with poet Joy Sullivan
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4/11: The unbearable beams of love with Anne Lamott
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4/4: Understanding the Drama Triangle with Courtney Smith
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3/28: The collective power of teenage girls with Mattie Kahn
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3/21: Breaking family patterns with Vienna Pharaon
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3/14: The upsides of menopause with Lisa Mosconi, PhD
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3/7: On the scientific and the spiritual with Jeffrey Kripal, PhD
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2/29: Five things I’ve been thinking about (Solo Episode)
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Intergenerational Anxiety: Understanding which Part is Ours
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You Have to Start Where You Are
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PART 4: The Achilles Heel of Women
PART 3: Who Gets to Be an Expert?
PART 2: The Perception (and Reality) of Scarcity
PART 1: Ending the “Manel”—Doing this Requires Understanding Ourselves
My Baby-Thin Skin: The Shame of “Disappointing” People and Our Doubled Selves
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Full archive HERE
My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
Wow, as usual, there is so much pithy food for thought and new authors for me to read here, thank you! This post makes me think of a conversation that has been coming up a lot over the last few years. It’s often said by a peer, a midlife woman (friends or patients with adolescent daughters or sons who are dating girls): “Why are girls so complicated?” And it riles me up to commit a deadly sin (anger) like no other question/statement. I respond with THEY aren’t inherently difficult. They were fresh potatoes that got tossed into a salty broth (the current state of the world/patriarchy/bikini industrial complex) and are now simmering in this Maggi-overseasoned soup and we call them salty. Interesting how Gilligan points out that Greta did something different when she realized she wasn’t ok with the salty broth she was living in. The "uncomplicated" girls that we don’t complain about, well, they absorb the broth, try to fit in and we in turn find them so much more digestible. What I am "really, actually" saying is that I intend to work to metabolize this somehow.... Otherwise, I’m at risk of my blood pressure going high with this excess sodium and as you said Elise, it’s true, heart disease is the number one killer of women!
It’s so interesting to read this as it reminds me how lucky I was to land at Emma Willard right after Carol completed the Dodge study. She’d also written In a Different Voice about her work at our school. Our instructors were introduced to all aspects of it and my time there in the early 90s was steeped in instruction about using our voices, constructive arguing, etc. It was such a unique learning environment for high school. I really hope educators take a lot of her work to heart and work to incorporate it into school values and teaching methods - calling in girls equally, encouraging them to develop their voices, etc. This newsletter has motivated me to familiarize myself with her more recent work. Thank you.