In a Different Voice
Balsam, Rosemary H.
Woman's morality IN A DIFFEHEHT VOICE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY AND WOMEN'S DEVELOPMENT Carol Gilligan Harvard Univerlty Press, $15, 184 pp. Rosemary H. Balsam ANY BOOK which seeks to illuminate...
...To show early differences, Ms...
...The story is as follows...
...She believes that females develop a sense of self and values, in a contextual matrix of interaction with others, measuring the effects of their behavior and attitudes in relation to the outcome on others...
...Gilligan's work, In a Different Voice, is lively, well-written, and propounds an interesting thesis...
...In early development at least, women may put intimacy first, whereas men may put autonomy first...
...Rosemary H. Balsam ANY BOOK which seeks to illuminate aspects of women's development is welcome...
...Unfortunately I think that the content of her arguments does not do justice to the interest of the ideas she initiates...
...She focuses on the development of morality in young women, and within this strand of development she raises the knotty problem of comparative judgments between ultimate concepts of maturity in both sexes...
...Thus Gilligan believes that women develop primarily with a psychologically less-separated sense of themselves than do boys and men...
...The classical sense of morality, dealing as it does with abstract rules of behavior and a search for truths regarding the rights of the individual, may belong more naturally in a domain of male development...
...It has been (and remains), extraordinarily difficult to make comparisons between boys and girls, or men and women, without finding one better and one worse than the other...
...In contrast, she believes that developing males pay more attention to their own autonomous behavior and attitudes...
...Heinz, who has a small sum of money and a deathly ill wife, is refused the life-giving medicine for his spouse by a money-conscious druggist...
...At the book's end she expounds a little more on the fruitful idea that underlying sexist attitudes have influenced what she feels is a mental health idealization of the state of' 'separateness.'' Again the claim is arresting but ill-substantiated, and a good idea loses its verve in circular repetition, rather than gaining impetus by deepening exploration...
...But once a measure of autonomy is accepted, they allow themselves the conflict engendered in becoming more separate...
...Over and over again we see them teasing out standards of intimacy exclusively based on hurting others, weighing their "selfishness...
...Gilligan's opinion this is characteristic of the female response...
...For example, she says of one woman, "Her emerging sense that selfishness and unselfishness might be relative rather than absolute judgments, a matter of interpretation or perspective rather than of truth, extends into two concepts of morality, one centered on rights, the other on responsibility...
...The boy replies that of course he should steal, as life is more important than money...
...If there is something to her hunch, then one would need much more clinical empirical evidence, as well as a conveyed sense that the writer had an appreciation of unconscious motivation, and a knowledge of early childhood development for both sexes...
...In Ms...
...The female, who is more bound up with the immediately harmful effects of her actions in her environment, dwells on interpersonal responsibility to guide her sense of morality...
...The child is asked if Heinz should steal the medication...
...Gilligan aptly pinpoints a major flaw in much of the psychological writing as far as these comparisons go...
...Both children are deeply concerned with the welfare of the people...
...Gilligan then looks at a series of young women struggling with the issue of abortion...
...Her thesis is suggestive, and may be plausible, if extremely incomplete...
...The issues which Ms...
...The boy chooses a more abstract and logically reasoned approach...
...She puzzles about the personal interactions, struggling with solutions which potentially will save all parties hurt...
...He finally questions any law too harsh to take into account the mitigating circumstances of Heirtz's dilemma...
...The author does not elaborate on this issue beyond noting the bias, but one wonders if the general unconscious preoccupation with images of the female genitalia as "lacking" the phallus may influence even the most objective and scientific investigation...
...So long as autonomy is in doubt, interpersonal conflict will be viewed as necessarily destroying relationships...
...Gilligan wants to guard against this pitfall by looking at interview data from the vantage of what there is as opposed to what there is not by comparison with men...
...Gilli-gan cites an example of the responses of two eleven-year-olds to a moral dilemma posed by interviewers gathering data for Konlberg's study of the stages in moral development...
...For men, the direct consequences to others seem to be secondary...
...From the phallo-centric viewpoint, women have often been compared in terms of "lacks" or "deficits...
...No, Heinz should not steal...
...The development of men is little touched on in this book, except to imply that such struggle occurs earlier in men, and that as they mature they may have to redefine earlier defensive ways of insisting on separateness in order to experience an uphill struggle towards intimacy...
...It is an uphill struggle...
...Gilligan's contention is that the girl's way of proceeding is too complex for the Kohlberg schemata...
...It is different from the boy's method, but it is just as valid a way to arrive at standards for decent human behavior...
...Freud, as we all know, despaired in his conclusion that he could find no sense of morality in women that was comparable to men...
...The girl, given the problem, is puzzled...
...Women, Gilligan believes, develop in dialogue with others, weighing the pros and cons of the hurt engendered...
...Ideals of human development, however, have stressed the superiority of goals in separation/individuation, and in this way women have been seen as "lacking...
...Comparison of development of the moral sense in the sexes should surely take on some theoretical psychoanalytic discussion of the superego, of a comparison of defensive styles in organizing affect, of different modes of ego functioning in men and women, and perhaps even something about societal influences in sexual identity expectations which might bear on the matter...
...When she mentions only separation/individuation issues in relation to the thread of moral development, the understanding yielded by her interesting observations becomes too slight...
...Her text suffers from a kind of superficial generalization in which points are made but the subsequent thoughts are not developed and deepened...
...The girl chooses a more interactional mode of approach...
...Logically he conceives the crime in relation to the law...
...Neither should his wife die...
...The girl has spoken "in a different voice," and has been judged inferior because of that difference...
...Gilligan raises are fascinating...
...Both sexes eventually have to come to terms with some kind of balance between autonomy and conjunctive intimacy...
...The young women seem to develop increasingly towards separateness while simultaneously struggling for intimacy...
...In coming to terms with their decision, new standards are fashioned that leave more room for self-preservation and relative autonomy...
...She does not deal with the implication, also in the material, of the fantasied outcome upon others...
...The latter scores lower on Kohlberg's scale...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 16
