Really Hearing Our Own Voices (Carol Gilligan, PhD)
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Dr. Carol Gilligan is an esteemed professor and developmental psychologist, who is the author of a landmark book called In a Different Voice—a book that I talk about and write about all the time. Back in the ‘80s—Gilligan is 87 now and still working—she looked at all the research from the likes of Lawrence Kohlberg and Piaget and made a stunning and obvious realization: These developmental psychologist giants had only ever studied boys. Typically white, middle-class boys. In response, Gilligan did a study on girls and moral development, a groundbreaking look into how culture genders our response to the world: Gilligan found that for girls, morality is relational and rooted in care—not so much law—and that fear of separation from relationship encouraged these girls to stop saying what they know. She struggled to get this study published—it was rejected multiple times—and has since become the most requested reprint out of Harvard. It also became the subject of In a Different Voice, which has sold 500,000 copies—unheard of in academic publishing. Everything that Carol Gilligan shares with us in this conversation is a revelation and also deeply resonant—and something you will know to be true. Before I go, if you missed Niobe Way’s episode from a few weeks ago, tune in to that next—Niobe was Carol’s student, and has done for boys what Carol has done for girls.
MORE FROM CAROL GILLIGAN:
Carol Gilligan’s Website
Niobe Way’s Episode: “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”
FROM MY NEWSLETTER:
“What Are We ‘Really, Actually” Saying
“Why is it So Hard to Scream?”
EPISODES IN THE “GROWING UP” SERIES:
Niobe Way, “The Critical Need for Deep Connection”
Harvey Karp, M.D., ”The Long-Term Implication of Sleep”
Carissa Schumacher, “Signs of High Intuition”
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
You are like my, I am trying to think of what the right person is, like my Madonna. I love
CAROL:
I love the title of the book.
ELISE:
Thank you. Yeah, I've invoked you sort of in every talk I've given about the book, there's such a gut punch that you talk about in both Why does patriarchy persist and in a human voice where you talk about where your work intersects with Nabi ways and this idea that for girls, I don't know, and for boys it's I don't care and I feel like everyone who hears that is like, oh my God, now I see, I understand the way that culture is fracturing children from themselves.
CAROL:
Yeah, Niobe was my student.
ELISE:
Oh, she was
CAROL:
My student at Harvard and now we're best friends.
ELISE:
Oh, amazing. I'm interviewing her soon. I'm reading her newest book right now,
CAROL:
Which is great. I think it's fabulous.
ELISE:
Yes, and I know that In a Different Voice is a mega bestseller within the world of academia, but how do these books get a wider audience? Particularly I love in her new book how she talks about thin stories versus thick stories and the thin stories, God, they're pernicious
CAROL:
And why do people believe them? Yeah, exactly. I love it. I love her work, obviously.
ELISE:
Yeah, and both of you I think too write about, I mean it's a six word sentence, but you talk about how we're living in this world that's preoccupied or obsessed with gender and she talks about it as reifying gender norms, that that's not the intent of this movement. I mean, it breaks my heart to hear men in particular, men I respect who I think have some really good ideas, but going straight to this place where the cure for culture and the cure for what's happening to boys and men is more masculinity and this fear that it's this corrupting influence of the feminine, again, giving all the power to the feminine. It's so interesting how scared people are. What is that? What is that? I know we have cultural contempt for what we code as feminine, and we should talk about all of that too, but why is culture so terrified because that's the end of patriarchy. Is it that simple?
CAROL:
Honestly, the fear is because I mean, yes, you have to talk about where is this coming from? That's where you talk about patriarchy, but when masculinity is defined as being superior, then I think the terror is that what's at stake is masculinity, and I mean obviously that's not true in any intrinsic sense, but if your sense of being a real man or one of the boys means you have to have this position of being superior, then it feels like a huge threat. Anything that's feminine is going to erode your masculinity, but there's all these new books just come out about fathers and how taking babies just changes the physiology of men, and it's not a man woman thing, it's a human thing.
ELISE:
Yeah, I'm looking at Father Time.
CAROL:
Yeah, Sarah Hrdy. Yeah, she's fantastic.
ELISE:
Yeah, we're talking about her book later this summer and her work in general, but I feel like so much of this, again, it somehow hasn't, I mean it's permeated culture in some sense, but we still are so attached to these old stories about what it is to be a good woman, what it is to be a strong man and relying obviously intensely on your work. The thesis of my book is that women are conditioned for goodness and men are conditioned for power, and we pursue these cultural ideas as though they're our nature.
CAROL:
This has really come through to me very strongly with the work I've done with girls and also with women. There are real consequences for not pursuing it. My current project, I'm back in girls schools right now and my current project is called Breaking the Bargain, which is the bargain that patriarchy makes with women is that the price of inclusion or success of being loved or being promoted is basically not to say what you really feel and think in some ways, not to name the obvious is what we've just been talking about, but to learn what other people want you to say and think basically silencing the itself is the price, but that's of course the root to depression and it undermines democracy. But I really have come to feel this, my work on girls that led me to it, this doesn't happen for no reason because there are real costs of speaking out for women, and so the rewards that reign down upon you.
In fact, I mean we just had three women college presidents, women who had risen to the very, very top of the educational establishments, presidents of Harvard and MIT and Penn, and they're in front of Congress and they're asked by at least Anik, what do you think about genocide against the Jews? And basically they have no voice. And you think, I mean, that's a position where some kind of moral voice is called for some kind of educational leadership, some sort of, this is what I think about genocide, nevermind against who, and the sense that the price of realizing to the top for these women was basically they had silenced their own voice and they were just repeating what some lawyer told them to say, and then you think, well, if that's the price of advancement every step of the way in exchange for learning what they want you to say rather than what you yourself would say, and this gets played out among girls about, they'll talk about writing two papers, the one that gets you a scholarship or whatever and the one they want to write.
I think the same is true for men. They are not perceived as real men. I mean, just think of the rhetoric of Donald Trump about being strong, not weak, being a winner, not a loser. So if you start to do things that are coded feminine and you're a guy, you start to be seen as weak, you start to be seen as a loser, you don't get chosen for these inner circle kind of things. So my experience from especially doing the work I did with girls, you start to challenge this. It's like putting your finger in an electric socket because you think you're just doing good work. My project was called Strengthening Healthy Resistance, encouraging Girls. I mean, honestly, who could object? I never got so much push.
ELISE:
I loved reading about the genesis of the work. I don't recall you talking about that in a different voice, but talking about how nobody would publish it. Right? Didn't it take you three times to resubmit and resubmit
CAROL:
With the articles that they have? Now, 45 years later, the Harvard Ed Review republished in a special issue with incredible articles by six of my former students, including Niobe Way because it became the bestselling reprint of the Ed review and the centerpiece of my book. But at the time, yeah, they said, first we don't know what this is. And then they said, this is not social science and the fight to be heard in one's own right and on one's own terms. That was basically what that was about.
ELISE:
And this core disruption, and please fact check me on this, but that Kohlberg and Piaget and all these giants within the world of psychological development had only ever studied boys. And again, the tendency seems to be conflate nature and culture always so cultured boys as an idea of what it is to be human solely, which makes what you found so not only fascinating, but the other half of humanity, and then again, feminine as base or regressive rather than maybe the higher level. That didn't make sense, but can you talk about that a bit?
CAROL:
Well, yeah, I mean what you're talking about, which was extraordinary for me to recognize this because I knew, I mean, I taught with Eric Erickson, I taught with Lawrence Kohlberg and I had huge respect for these people. And then there were things like it was right there, but you weren't supposed to notice it or you weren't supposed to think it was a problem. And I hadn't noticed it, which was what was so interesting to me that Kohlberg's six stages of moral development that he arrived at it by a study with 84 white boys and it's like, wait a minute. And then suddenly he couldn't make sense of what girls were saying. And then you pick up PJ's book the Moral Judgment of the Child, and you look in the index and there's an entry for girls, and there are four things about how girls are different.
There's no entry for boys because the child is assumed to be a boy. So this sense of, I mean, what I did, which was kind of completely was an innocent move at the time because of a really historical circumstances, I found myself listening to women in the midst of a field of psychology that hadn't listened to women, and I heard a voice that was different, and that voice had been because it was emotional as well as rational, and because it spoke about relationships as well as the self, it was seen as less developed. And so I said, wait a minute, Freud said, women have less sense of justice than men. Kohlberg said, women don't reach the highest of my stages of moral development. And I said, wait a minute, here was a whole field constructed by very intelligent people who didn't see the absence of women as a problem.
I mean, it was really extraordinary. And that's what I mean when you talk about the pressures on women and the rewards that are offered if we simply don't disrupt this. I remember Ericson said to me, because he has this eight stages of his lifecycle, and then he says, but for women, the sequence is a little bit different because women join intimacy and identity. And then it's like, wait a minute, you're saying here's your theory of the lifecycle and for half the population it doesn't really work. And then he said, but my wife made this weaving of the stages. You don't want her to have to take apart the weaving. You don't.
ELISE:
Amazing. And the central premise is sort of again, why your work is, I think so powerful is it takes what's invisible and it makes it visible and it's so incredibly obvious, right? It's all felt, but it hasn't been seen or stated. Yeah.
CAROL:
And then you say, I mean, because you were talking about culture before that the power of culture to blind us to the obvious, so we don't see what's literally right in front of our eyes. I mean like the work on boys, this notion that boys are emotionally clueless. Well, if you pay attention to little boys, the study I did was Judy Chua four and five year olds, they were remarkably emotionally in tune then that gets called feminine or girly gay, and then they distance it
ELISE:
A hundred percent, or just this idea that somehow boys don't need tenderness and care. And it's like, well, I have two sons. I can tell you that they screamed like any other baby for attention and affection and care.
CAROL:
It's a strange thing to say, I have three sons. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
ELISE:
Yes. Their humanness is remarkable and not necessarily socialized into them as babies. And also it makes perfect sense too because our patriarchal culture rests on the invisibility. It relies on the invisibility of care to acknowledge care and what's required would make sort of the whole house of cards come down. And we know this, we saw this so clearly in Covid, but just because something isn't part or a huge part of the way that we recognize GDP or economy, which actually comes economy, the root of economy is house is invisible. And for us to change our system of understanding what's required would require retooling of our whole culture.
CAROL:
Yeah, that's exactly right. So the work of caring is underpaid. It's both idealized and undervalued. It's largely done by women and often women of color and yeah, exactly. It challenges people who have to see themselves as independent and autonomous and not needing care have to ensure that nobody sees all the care that is being devoted to them.
ELISE:
Can you talk a little bit in part, I want to make sure that I understand it, but when you start putting the psychological development models together, the way that girls prioritize relationship and fear separation, which I think we can talk a bit about that, more about that too, as you were saying, when you are conditioned to pursue goodness, again, a social idea of goodness, it makes you incredibly vulnerable to reputational harm. Someone just has to say you're bad and you're done. It's wild to watch that play out in culture. You mentioned the college presidents who presented as unfeeling and yes, I would say were dislocated from their own voices or what happened to Hillary Clinton would be another example of separation from I would guess, I don't know her but herself.
CAROL:
Oh, I think because if you know her, which I do, she's absolutely a very warm person,
ELISE:
But the culation required the armoring of women who sort of this need to be more like men versus a culture where it's like, why is that also what we say? Be like a man Carol, go channel your man. Where it's like, no, can we all be more like women? We might not be in so much trouble. But when you think about this cycle of, again, going to the model of women seeing justice through the lens of relationship and care and fearing separation, men seeing justice as I guess the sort of logical rational, but that the ultimate is the way that women or the feminine can bring the individuation back into relationship and integration. Is that how it works? And then you sort of begin the next phase of individuation and growth and then you have to bring it back into relationship integration and care.
CAROL:
Well, I'll tell you where that work led to was the realization that we all start out in relationship and that's where we begin. We all start out having a voice and in relationship, and then when these gender norms start to be introduced and you take human capacities and you say that reason is masculine and emotion is feminine as if boys don't feel and as if girls don't think it's, in a way it's so ludicrous. It's amazing that anyone ever repeats this. But then boys feel that if they want to be one of the boys or a real boy, they have to distance themselves or at least not show those parts of themselves, their tenderness, their empathy that would make them look soft or weak or girly or gay. And so they start to split. I mean, it's really kind of a split. And then girls coming of age when this notion that to be good is to be selfless, literally that was the word that the good woman responds to other people and she doesn't think about herself.
That would be selfish. That's the word that women use. And I remember saying to women, if it's good to be empathic with people and responsive to people's needs and concerns, you are a person. Why is it selfish to respond to yourself? And woman after woman said to me, good question. It just doesn't even make sense. It's a culture that's at odds with who we are psychologically, and that's why I wrote my current book and called it Any Human Voice because it's, I said gender was central to the work I did because I saw how these gender norms really begin to create psychological barriers within all people, I mean in different ways from different groups to keep them from being fully human. And so what really what we're talking about here is what it means to be human. That's why I love Sarah Her's latest book, Father Time, which is Humans who take Care of Babies, it affects their physiology. I mean, it shifts their hormonal balance. It shifts their neurological thing, and that's about being human. So you can be a man and you can be nurturant and tender. The amazing thing about saying something like that is, who doesn't know this? But we
ELISE:
Do, I know
CAROL:
Mean it feels like saying the obvious. It's a child in that fairytale, the Emperor’s New Clothes that says what's true, which is the emperor's naked. But then everybody learns to say what's really not true, and my work a lot is really about learning to see what's right in front of your eyes and to say it and to look at what is in the way it means what's in the way of our being humans of our humanity. And right now that seems rather urgent.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and part of it too, I learned this as a child. It's so steeped in our culture of these thin stories about what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a man, and the stock that we came from where the men were valiant hunters and the women were hanging in caves with babies on their boobs and fighting for the best mates amongst each other, whatever is this story. That's a total story. And as we will never know the full truth, but as we developed the technological resources to reexamine the story, coming to a different understanding of a time when maybe we were more balanced, more affiliative, and where women were also hunters, men were also nurturers. There was a whole lot of foraging. There was a whole lot of taking care of each other to ensure survival, and yet we continue to steep ourselves in this idea that to be a woman is to be always in this regressive caretaking space.
It goes back to Sarah's work on allo parenting. This is like a multi-generational community-based effort to survive, but yet we're so locked in and it's insidious. I think the way that to push against it suggests that you're deviant rather than to recognize There was a time, we are far more creative, far more varied, and I hear this from women too who sort of were like, well, it was a matriarchy and we have to get back to a matriarchy. It's like there was never a culture of dominant oppressive women. That's not the answer. The answer is balance. It's important for all of us to caretake and love each other and be in relationship, and it's important for us to experience ourselves in the world from a place of ideally secure attachment. Right?
CAROL:
Absolutely. Yeah. But I think right now that this fight is out in the open, I mean I think it's because these changes have really happened that now something that was going on in a sense more undercover is now out in the open and the fight is between democracy and patriarchy. That's very clear. I mean, that's just playing out politically, whether you're going to solve human conflicts by force or by open discussion and debate, by having it's voice or violence, democracy or patriarchy. And I think that's what's going on right now because it is changing. I mean, there's a book called Father Time and my book is called In a Human Voice, and this is a human story. And it was just bizarre to realize that the whole field of psychology was incredibly gendered because psychologists were studying boys and men and writing about humans. I mean, they were selecting on the basis of gender.
It was this book on teenagers. It got hugely funded in research in peer review called The Psychological World of the Teenager, a study of 175 boys, and it was co-authored by Daniel Offerer and his wife Judith. So he wasn't seeing the absence of girls as significant, and she wasn't seeing the absence of girls like herself as consequential, so to say, wait a minute, let's have the whole of humans. Let's look at the whole thing that disrupted that patriarchal structure, which was kind of enforced but invisible, and now it's become visible. And so the struggle now I think between patriarchy and democracy or between voice and violence as ways to solve conflicts, it's out in the open round.
ELISE:
How do you see it ending? What do you see as a cultural profit or feeling what's present but maybe not spoken because this is killing boys and men? Maybe it's weird to say that, but I feel like women are surviving and sometimes thriving even though this world is not constructed for that for us, whereas I feel like boys and men are dying.
CAROL:
Yeah, no, I mean it is really true because part of masculinity is, it's defined that way is any insult to masculinity leads to violence. And so if you look at who's involved in most of the violence in this world is boys and men, the question is exactly the question you're asking. How do we bring this to an ending? And I think right now it's reaching such a crisis. Sometimes things have to come to crisis and really be kind of very stark. And I think it's no accident that the kids are talking about gender. And I think in a sense, you see, what would you say? It's sort of in neon lights. You see on the one hand, this kind of return to this patriarchal masculinity, we have to be winners, not losers. We have to be strong or weak, that kind of thing, versus this other side, which is we have to change how we understand who we are. And that's Sarah's work and it's, what was it? Frans der Waal who said, who recently died, all of our, we have to rethink all of our assumptions about human nature because we start in relationship and with a voice basically we're born with the requisites for love and for democracy.
What you're really talking about is like a giant collective neurosis of what you would say, which is what is a neurosis when you keep doing something which is ultimately self-defeating, and we can see it's ruining the planet, it's going to make this planet uninhabitable With nuclear weapons, we could wipe out everything. So we cannot keep doing things in the way we used to do them in the past. And I have a lot of belief in young people. I mean, I really do think they're coming at this at a time where it's so obvious that we need to find new ways, and I think that's where the hope is.
ELISE:
They're going to take us there.
CAROL:
I really do. I hang out. I have grandchildren, but they're all teenagers. So I think
ELISE:
I know. And then of course there's a trend that suggests that there's some extreme regression towards reified gender roles, which I guess is part of it. But going to that Frans der Wal statement that you just said too, it's like we're also born with, I think you said voice and relationship, but also the dual quest for truth and love and the pursuit of one without the other is destruction. It
CAROL:
Leads to unhappiness. Yeah, and destruction. Absolutely.
ELISE:
I'm sure you get asked this question all the time, and I, I mean I write about your work all the time. It's a little freaky, Carol, but when you talk, you write in the human voice about listening for women and girls when they cue really, or actually as sort of the moment to drop in and understand how they really do you connect people? Is it enough of an insight to say there are two voices operating in you for people to start listening to that secondary voice in themselves? Or do you coach people through that?
CAROL:
Well, first of all, now what I realize is that there's an under voice and a cover voice. There's a human voice that goes undercover and it gets covered by a voice, which sounds often more adaptive and so forth. So if you want to hear the Under Voice, you may have to question the cover voice. I have a great example from my current research, which is we are interviewing kids and this is a ninth grader, and she was asked, can you tell me something about ninth grade? And she says, everyone here is really nice, and the interviewer says everyone, and she says, that's a lie. I don't know why I said that.
ELISE:
Yeah.
CAROL:
So I teach a course on listening and I'm writing a book on radical listening, which is to learn how to start to hear, you have to hear the cover voice. And it's just like where we started when you said about your book about being good, it's like everybody here is nice. It's a girl's school that's the cover voice. And because the interviewer said everybody, and she says, that's a lie. I don't know why I said that, but if you didn't question that cover voice, you would never hear it. And I write about this in my book, but the time that really blew my mind with his cover voice in Under Voice, and it is now, I listen for the words really and actually and the phrase to be honest, because people signal when they're switching, which was amazing to me. But I write about, in fact, this is, I think you've interviewed Terry Real because he and I did this project together with couples and there was this couple, and they were really at an impasse and they both worked in business and so forth, and they were very progressive.
They went to their church. They were leaders in bringing women into the church, but the husband suspected that the wife was sleeping with a guy at her work, and he would ask her, are you sleeping with that guy? And she didn't answer him, and I thought she knew perfectly well that if she said anything, that's the only thing he would ever talk about. So she wouldn't answer, but of course not answering answers It in a way, I said to him, why ask her if? And that didn't get me anywhere. He said to me, then it's the ultimate nightmare. He said to me, he was going to explain to me her in the arms of another man, and now I know the culture. I know about the Trojan War. I know that until fairly recently, a man could kill a wife and her lover if he found them paying almost no penalty, but I could actually think of worse nightmares.
So it was a real question when I said to him, why is that the ultimate nightmare? And his response blew me away. He said to me, the ultimate nightmare really for me there is the word is never being able to show her how I really feel. There it is again, to be a family man and to open my heart and to love her, you know that. And then if he could not open his heart and show her how he really felt, and then if she's involved with someone else, it has a completely different meaning. But the cover story was, it's the ultimate nightmare. She and the arms of another man, I'm going to start the Trojan War because it's so insulting to my masculinity and so forth and so on, as opposed to the under boys was he understood what was going on.
ELISE:
Wow.
CAROL:
So I learned as a researcher and an interviewer working with Terry's therapist, that you have to know the culture. You have to question the cover voice because that's the voice. That's the voice that people want to hear. Do you see what I mean? And because otherwise you'll never hear the under voice. So that's when I wrote about in a human voice was I was interviewing in a way. I was listening for the Under Voice.
ELISE:
Oh, that's stunning. I have a related story in my own therapy. My therapist does EMDR and he's a Jungian. And we were talking about my ongoing anxiety about saying the truth, and it doesn't always get you friends as you know, and it can be dangerous. And this is not even in relationship, but more publicly or out in the open. And my therapist said to me, he said, where do you think you learned that to be quiet or that is dangerous? And I was like, it must've been my mother. And he said, okay, let's go to a time. Can you take me to a time? And I was like, wait a minute. This is total bullshit. It's not my mother. My mother is almost on the spectrum in terms of how unfiltered she is. It can be kind of terrifying, but that's my story. It goes to sort of the way that we pick the cultural cue, pick the story that it's always in your family, Carol.
That's where all of this starts. It's not culture and it's always in your mother. Meanwhile, my mother, if anything, has modeled for me how to be fierce, brave, and courageous in the face of unpopularity. And it's funny when I write about her honestly too, people are like, how could you do that? She'll get reach outs about like, God, that's so disloyal. I wrote a New York Times op-ed about her as a mom not wanting to be a mom. And she was like, half of her friends were like, this is so funny and true, and God, I love this and I love you too. And the other half were like, how could Elise do this to you? She read every draft. She knew. She blessed every part of it. But it was interesting in that moment to watch myself and catch myself go for the story rather than the truth.
CAROL:
Right, because the point is it's real. I mean, as you said, there are real for not telling the truth. Exactly.
ELISE:
Yeah. It's wild actually, the more I think about it too, the more I'm like, it's just words, but yet there's nothing more terrifying than a woman with a voice.
CAROL:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, think about the Dobbs decision. Once a woman becomes pregnant, she has no voice.
ELISE:
No voice.
So let's talk about that. Let's talk about this crazy moment, this extreme regression. I want to talk about sort of women in this moment too and the way that we're reacting to each other. And I think again, it goes to this idea that there is still, and I have this in me, so let me own it, contempt for what we code as feminine ideas and the way that women, it feels like we just still struggle to sort of get on side with each other and it's so easy to inspire us to sort of go at each other in the performance or lack of performance, of feminine values and the contempt that we have. So I'm thinking of, what was his name? Butkins, the guy who gave the commencement address about how his wife's greatest privilege and joy is taking care of and their children and the uproar
CAROL:
That depends on her having no voice.
ELISE:
No voice. He's her voice in this moment. And it was interesting. I was like, if she were saying it, it would be very different. It would land differently, but still it sets a trap for us to go wild. And I understand why we go wild, but in terms of this, how could that ever be enough? And again, this is a difficult, but maybe I'm choosing it because it's a tricky example of this, but we go for that to be the sum experience of her life. The ultimate experience of her life is so wrong and messed up. It's like our instinct is to go to this place where that is so regressive that is so bad. Maybe this is a bad example, but can you talk about it? I feel it in myself where it's like, well, if you're not also doing something with your life, you're not really living. And we think of that as not doing something with your life.
CAROL:
Well, I mean if what we think is, if I do something for anyone else, it's taking away from me. And if I do something for myself, it's taking away from somebody else. First of all, it's just not true. I mean, it's just not how it is. It really is kind of trying to disentangle what does it mean to live with yourself and live with other people, to respond to yourself and respond to other people without putting this overlay on it. That goodness is selfless and anything you do for yourself is selfish. That's what started my work. I interviewed women who were actually making a decision because the Supreme Court had said to them, you have a moral voice. You have to make a decision. If you're pregnant, do you want to continue it or have an abortion? These certain things, woman would call whatever she wanted to do, selfish.
If she wanted to have the baby that was selfish, if she wanted to have the abortion, that was selfish. And what was good was to do what other people wanted her to do or thought she should do. So I remember I interviewed this woman and she was telling me she was going to have an abortion because her boyfriend, I think, or maybe it was her husband, he was going to law school and he depended on her to support him. And so he wanted her to have the abortion. And I said to her, I understand what he wants, but what do you want? And she looked at me and she said, what's wrong with doing something for someone you love? And I said, nothing, but what do you want?
And the point is that if you play that out, if I do something because you want me to do it, then if I have second thoughts, I blame you because I did it because you told me to do it. And so this act that's supposed to sustain the relationship, in fact the relationship blows up because play it out. Say she has second thoughts about the abortion. So she says to him, you made me do it. He says to her, look, I told you what I wanted, but you could have done what you wanted. And so this act that was intended to sustain relationship, in fact, the relationship blew up. So this is a psychology that explodes in its own contradiction. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. And sometimes, I mean I have children. You have children. Caring for my children has been one of the most enhancing things I've done in my life, but it's not the only thing I've done that's enhancing, but it is. I don't think it's the way my life, I mean it enormously enriched my life. I have my granddaughter, one of them living with me right now. It is such a source of daily joy and pleasure, but so is writing. And so do you know what I mean?
As though we've put it this crazy making thing. I mean, the work I've done, because I've done this research on development with girls, with boys is if I see a man who looks like he's emotionally clueless, my question is what has happened to this human being? Because that's not how people start. I hear people say to me all the time, oh, we think it's so wonderful. You're helping women find their voices or girls. I say, wait a minute, girls have their voices. So I think we've been telling a story that within ourselves we know it doesn't even make any sense. One of the girls in my study said, if I were to say what I was feeling and thinking no one would want to be with me, my voice would be too loud. And then she said to me, but you have to have relationships.
So I said to her, but if you are not saying what you're feeling and thinking, then where are you in these relationships? She saw it. She just didn't know how she could be in relationships and say what she was feeling thinking. So last year I was interviewing this girl. She was in 11th grade, and she said to me, she was talking about not being able to say what she really thought in relationships that meant a lot to her. She said, I hold myself back so as not to jeopardize deeper connections. And I said to her, can I ask you the obvious question? She knew exactly what I meant. And then she said, well, that's when girls talk about I didn't want to make trouble. I wanted to keep the peace. I didn't want to hurt people's feelings. I didn't want to provoke people to retaliate. All the reasons why I basically silenced myself for the sake of relationships which aren't really relationships because I'm not there. And that another former student of mine, Dana Jack, wrote this book called Silencing the Self Depression in Women and Silencing the Self is a Road to Depression. And so there you have it.
ELISE:
Oh, Carol, I mean that was such an unlock. This idea that everything that a woman does that as of her own volition is coded or perceived by herself is selfish, is such a subtle paradigm shift. I am a little obsessed with this. What is it this chasm that makes it so difficult for women to get on side with other women besides sort of the obvious of aligning yourself with patriarchal power in some way for safety or security or whatever that may be. But that this idea, yeah, go ahead.
CAROL:
I think there are incentives for women to turn on other women. I mean, what I used to think when I was working with girls in middle school, I used to think it was like a sheep dog kind of thing, where any girl who stood out, they'd have to kind of draw her back in. And the sense that what would it take for women to support women or rather, what is in the way of that? I mean, if they want someone to attack a woman, they usually look for another woman to do it.
ELISE:
Yeah, we love to do it. I have some theories about it, but what do you think that is?
CAROL:
Well, that's why I think you have to look. What I became aware of when I started writing about resistance, and I thought the healthy body resists infection. We have an immune system and the healthy psyche resists a culture that's going to infect us psychologically that's going to keep us from basically being able to function psychologically. And what I realized is that there is, I, you see little boys going to school and they come up against it in this school, pre kindergarten, kindergarten where to be one of the boys, they have to be tough. And then you see girls at adolescents coming into where to be included, not excluded to be one of the girls that people want to be with. And that's when you get there, you have to be nice. You have to be seemingly perfect. She's good at everything. She's good at drawing and she's good at sports and she never that kind of thing.
And so what I'm trying to say is there's a force in the world that you're up against with this kind of stuff. It's not just coming from inside people. So I think with girls, as they become young women when they become adolescents and so forth and they become of interest, really the idea is they have to align their perceptions with men and they're allowed to turn against women, and I used to call it the good woman police. That's what you write about women police each other that they see a woman who's moving out of line and they basically go after her and they say, you can't do that. And they enforce that. So that as a woman, this goes back to in a different voice where for a woman to be at the top, that's dangerous because you want to be at the center because if you get out, that good woman police draws you back in.
I will hear my students now say, this is a selfish question, meaning it's their question. It's like, what? That's means something I want to know. I mean, you can just see how you can enforce a whole social structure if you take half the population who to be called women and their function is to care for the other half of the population, which is to be called men, but you can't really even talk about it. The men are supposed to be independent, and so they're not supposed to need care. It's surreptitiously. Women are caring for them. I mean, it's like all going on and nobody can talk about it. The big insight, why I wrote in a different voice is I heard women questioning this. It was so interesting. Not all women, but some women. And instead of seeing selflessness as if I have no voice of my own, as if I have no self, instead of holding that up as the epitome of feminine goodness, what we were just talking about, they saw it as morally problematic because it signified an abdication of voice.
That's what I was telling you before. If I act as if I have no voice and I do what I'm doing because you said I should do it or something, then I'm going to blame you for it. So it's an abdication of voice and an invasion of responsibility and relationship. I'm myself, I'm not taking responsibility for what I do, and I'm actually taking myself out of relationships ostensibly for having relationships, which then is going to blow up in this contradiction. That's why it's sort of like a neurosis. We keep repeating this as though this makes sense and it really doesn't.
ELISE:
Yeah, and then we become sort of willing victims or willing participating in this. I would almost call it a victimhood because there are obviously real victims in our culture, but this sort of like, I'm not responsible. I don't have any power. As you said, I've abdicated myself and I'm being compelled. I'm not choosing, I'm being compelled. Therefore, if you figure it out, which just isn't going to resolve anything that's going on in the world,
CAROL:
There was this thing called the Girls Index, I think it's called, or the Girls List. Somebody interviewed 10,000 teenage girls in the us. This was recently, and one of the questions was, do you not say what you really feel and think because you want people to luck you and do you not disagree when you in fact do disagree because you want people to like, and 46% of us teenagers, since 10,000 teenagers said, yes, they do that. You take the girls who have straight A averages four point and above, the percentage goes up to 62% because these are the girls with more to lose. I mean, they're the ones, all the opportunities are open to them. So for them to say what they really feel and think or for them to disagree when they disagree, I mean they have much more at stake at the same time, that means they'll never do creative work. I mean, that's the road to be becoming the college president who has no voice.
ELISE:
Oh, that's so big. This was amazing. This was a dream for me.
It's funny, as I was sending this episode off to my producer, Phil, I initially wrote, I think I talked too much, so can you minimize me? And it's just ironic considering Carol's work that said, I would love to be in conversation with her for hours and hours and hours, and I want her to fact check my own thinking and explain these concepts to me in a deeper way. She promised to come back and she has a new book that she's working on about deep listening. What I love about Carol's books is that they are so slim, a hundred pages, 200 pages, but just bam, they're loaded with wisdom and insights that she articulates in such a clarifying way. Like at the end when she was talking about how in that original study that fueled in a different voice, women were explaining their choices as selfish, and thus were feeling compelled to do what was asked or what they sensed other people wanted.
But that feels like such a big nugget, and I'm going to spend some time thinking about it in the context of why women are so easily armored up against each other. If you like today's episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.