The same concerns that initiated the Emma Willard study led Gilligan toward the project that became In a Different Voice. The book grew out of an essay Gilligan wrote in 1975, sitting at her "dining room table," she says. As a graduate student at the Graduate School of Education here, she had noted the absence or inaccuracy of studies about women in the psychological canon.

"Implicitly adopting the male life as the norm, they have tried to fashion women out of a masculine cloth," she wrote of earlier theorists in the introduction to her 1982 book." "In the life cycle, the woman has been the deviant."

"She took the whole field of moral development and asked us to think about moral development of whom and theorizing by whom," says Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard Medical School. "She reminded us that people devising theories do so out of their own experiences and sometimes out of their own limitations."

Two Ways of Thinking

In a Different Voice suggested that their are two ways of thinking about questions of morality, called by Gilligan the "care voice" and the "justice voice." While the justice voice tends to accent abstract principles and laws as reasons for moral behavior, the care voice deals more with emotions and relationships between people.

In a recent interview, Gilligan provided an example of what the care voice might mean, based on a fable presented to children who participated in one of the Harvard Project's studies.

The story involves a family of moles who take pity on a freezing porcupine and allow him to live with them. Eventually, the porcupine's quills cause the moles so much agony that they ask him to leave, and he refuses.

"Young girls talk about the hurt of the moles, the fact that the moles are being hurt," Gilligan says. "One girl asked if they could cover the porcupine with a blaket." The girls are concerned with the feelings of both parties.

By contrast, a more justice-oriented voice might say the porcupine should leave because the house, by right, belongs to the moles: "It's not the porcupine's house; the porcupine has to go."

Although Gilligan writes in her book "the different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but by theme," she does see the care voice as one which occurs more often and more consistently in women.

"Sex difference is the tendency," she says. "Women do tend to talk more from a premise of connection."

Criticism

Gilligan has been criticized for what Pulit zer Prize-winning author Susan Faludi, in her recent book, Backlash, calls "Victorian echoes."

"Gilligan may have left herself wide open to misinterpretation," Faludi wrote. "After disavowing generalizations about either sex, she seems to make them herself." Faludi also felt that the backgrounds and situations of the subjects Gilligan examined were not stressed enough. "Gilligan's 'studies' were not exactly drawn from ideal demographic samples," she wrote.

Zella Luria, a Tufts University psychology researcher who is cited in Faludi's book, agreed with her criticism. "I see no data to warrant the message that Carol Gilligan can tell us," Kuria said in an interview. "I find it psychologically very native to find that our experience is unencumbered knowledge we get from our innards."