Carol Gilligan

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Carol Gilligan and James Gilligan

Carol Gilligan (* 1936 ) is an American psychologist and feminist ethicist .

biography

Carol Gilligan studied English literature at Swarthmore College , psychology at Radcliffe College, and social psychology at Harvard University . She became known through the controversy with Lawrence Kohlberg in the debate about moral differences between men and women . Gilligan later founded the Harvard Center on Gender and Education with a donation from Jane Fonda of $ 12.5 million. There she developed a method of listening . In 2002 she got a professorship at New York University . There she deals with the resistance to patriarchy . In 1992 she received the Grawemeyer Award , in 1998 the Heinz Award .

Controversy Gilligan vs. Kohlberg

Carol Gilligan's main research interests in developmental psychology have been female morals . She worked for a long time at Kohlberg, who designed the 6-step model of moral development , and expanded Kohlberg's theory. Gilligan assumed that men question morals for abstract reasons, whereas women do so because of disappointing relationship experiences. She demonstrated that women's self-perception is more closely integrated into the social context and that, in studies on moral development that are based on the degree of autonomy , they inevitably show an average lower level than men.

Gilligan contrasts the male morality of justice with a female morality of care (→ care ethics ). Accordingly, when making moral judgments, women orient themselves more towards the relationship, interaction and responsibility structure of the person involved in a problem situation, while men, on the other hand, tend towards abstract rights and duties. Gilligan regards both types of morality, the female and the male, as structurally equivalent.

criticism

Christina Hoff Sommers countered that Gilligan did not provide any reliable data for her theses, just 'anecdotes', and that some of her data appeared to be fictitious because she refused to make it publicly available. Their claims would not be confirmed in research and would first have to be evaluated by neurology and evolutionary psychology .

Debra Nails accused Gilligan of a selective sample selection and the procedure was to be called literary rather than scientific.

Fonts

  • The other voice. Life conflicts and morals of women. Munich 1982
  • The Birth of Pleasure. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002
  • Kyra. A novel. Random House, 2008
  • with David AJ Richards: The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future , Cambridge University Press, 2009

literature

  • Debra Nails: Social-scientific sexism: Gilligan's mismeasure of man. Social Research, 50, 643-664. 1983
  • Christina Hoff Sommers: The war against boys: How misguided feminism Is harming our young men. Simon and Schuster, New York 2001

Web links