Emma, a local sixth-grader and a participant in the Harvard Project on the Psychology of Women and Girls, visited Boston's Museum of Fine Arts recently.

Asked to construct a dialogue with a statue in the museum, Emma had two questions: "Are you cold?" and "Would you like some clothes?" The statue, a legless and armless nude, responded, according to Emma's scenario, "I have no money."

Carol Gilligan, the director of the project and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says this story demonstrates Emma's "resistance," both political and psychological. It is this resistance and its implications for gender and behavior studies that Gilligan began to explore in her ground breaking work, In a Different Voice, published in 1982.

"Emma's playfully innocent, slightly irreverent conversation...bespeaks her interest in the scenes which lie behind the paintings and sculpture which she is seeing," Gilligan wrote last year in an article in the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Emma's words are an "inquiry into relationships between artists and models...a curiosity about the psychological dimensions of this connection between men and women."

Emma's questioning illustrates that young girls perceive situations and relationships in a way that many adults, and particularly adult men, do not, Gilligan says. These differences lie at the heart of Gilligan's work and are taken up as central problems for the Harvard Project.

"I am interested in turning points in people's lives, moments of crisis," Gilligan said in an interview recently. This turning point comes around the age of puberty when women's perceptions become "split between their experience and what has been socially constructed as reality," she says.

Girls "go underground," says Gilligan, and their unique voices are lost.

Dodge Study

One of the first attempts to retrieve those voices was the Dodge Study, a long-term research project undertaken at the Emma Willard School, a private girls school in upstate New York. The study was funded by the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation.

Initiated by Gilligan and the school's former principal, the Dodge Study was intended to fill a significant gap in the research done on adolescence. "Up until 1980, adolescent girls had not been studied," Gilligan says.

The Dodge Study began in 1981 and ended three years later. It involved one-on-one interviews with adolescent girls of different ages and resulted in a book of essays called Making Connections.

The girls were asked about their self-images and decision-making processes. They were given a sentence-completion test with questions like: "What gets me into trouble is..."

Gilligan says studies like these have shown how girls' behavior may be different from what was previously perceived as the norm for adolescents. They can "smell bullshit a mile away," says Elizabeth Debold, a fourth-year graduate student who has been involved in many of the Harvard Project's studies.

The study has had a positive effect on the Emma Willard School, says Marjorie G. Whiteman, an administrator there. "It made us rethink a great many things," she says, including dormitory assignments and teaching methods.