Their Own Voices

Psychologist Carol Gilligan has spent years listening to girls and young women. Now she wants to hear what little boys have to say.

Cambridge, Mass.

It has been nearly two decades since Carol Gilligan began to notice that, around the time girls crossed the threshold into adolescence, they began to talk about themselves differently.Girls who had been bold and insightful as preteenagers began to say “I don’t know” when asked to express their thoughts--even though a little probing revealed that they clearly did have answers.

On a deeper level, these same girls talked about being torn between doing what they were “supposed” to do and doing what they wanted to do. And they seemed to fear, most of all, being alone--without friends, family, or relationships.

What was happening, the Harvard University researcher theorized, was that she was observing a psychological crossroads in the development of girls into young women.

“If girls say what is on their minds or in their hearts, if they speak freely and reveal what they see and hear and know through experience, they are in danger of losing their relationships,” Gilligan wrote in a summary of her findings in 1996. But, she concluded, if they do not express what they are feeling and thinking, girls risk losing themselves.

Most girls, Gilligan argued, choose the second route. They drop their own “voices” to fit into a mold shaped by society and to avoid cutting themselves off from the people they love.

And, since “lies make you sick,” as Gilligan put it, the inner struggle these girls were experiencing might explain the array of psychological disorders that peak for girls in adolescence--from anorexia to depression--as well as an apparent drop-off in the level of originality in the schoolwork they turn in.

Her theories were controversial, and they touched off a wave of national attention to the problems of girls. The American Association of University Women used her studies as a touchstone for its own research on girls. And those studies tied what researchers saw as the persistent gender bias that girls faced in school to their low self-esteem in adolescence.

With support from the federal government and private foundations, schools began to beef up girl-centered curricula and to hold self-esteem workshops for girls. Some schools even began to educate girls in separate classes or schools.

“Carol’s work was instrumental in focusing attention on girls from all sorts of people--educators, researchers, parents,” says Susan McGee Bailey, the executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Research on Women in Wellesley, Mass.

Gilligan, in turn, became a celebrity academic. She was Time magazine’s choice as one of the 25 “most influential” people in 1996. A year later, she became the first holder of a chair on gender studies at Harvard’s graduate school of education. And already this year, she has won a Heinz Award, a $250,000 prize from the Heinz Family Foundation given to people in several fields who have made outstanding contributions.

Now, Gilligan’s career is taking a new direction. She has turned her keen ear and considerable influence to the development of little girls’ worst enemies: little boys.

“For over 100 years, researchers have been observing that girls are more resilient than boys in childhood and that something happens to girls in adolescence,” Gilligan says. “I wondered, was there an analogy for what happens to girls in adolescence for boys in early childhood?”

It has long been known, for example, that between ages 5 and 7, problems with bed-wetting, stuttering, and classroom behavior crop up in boys. Young boys are disproportionately diagnosed for learning disabilities and attention-deficit disorders. And all this seems to come as boys begin to separate from their mothers and start to become “one of the boys.”

Could they be losing their “voices,” too?

Gilligan’s new work comes amid a resurgence of interest nationwide in the lives of men and little boys. At least four books are slated for publication this year on boys’ development, and more are in the works. But Gilligan says her latest research focus is not trying to ride the crest of a “men’s movement” that parallels the feminist crusades of recent decades. Studying boys’ development is the logical next step, she says, in a lifetime of work that has always had one central feature at its core: human relations.

Gilligan’s office on the fifth floor of Harvard’s Larsen Hall overlooks the yard of the university’s formerly all-female sister school, Radcliffe College. A large painting, leaning against the wall, depicts a young girl standing in a wintry forest. Her gloved hand covers her mouth.

The bookshelves in this office read like a travelogue of Gilligan’s mind, a mixture of fiction, psychology, and writing about women. The weighty Theories of Adolescence sits alongside Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. The novels reflect both a lifetime passion for literature and a scholarly search for authentic women’s and girls’ voices. Gilligan majored in literature as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College before earning her doctorate in clinical psychology at Harvard, where she is now a professor of human development and psychology.

Books like Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Gilligan has found, offered a voice that was often missing from psychological literature and public-policy debates.

“What ties together the writer and the psychologist is an ear--an interest in listening to people’s voices,” Gilligan says. “There were no girls in studies of adolescence, but there were plenty of girls in novels.”

Gilligan’s appearance belies her 61 years. Her brown hair is long and loose, parted in the middle, with no signs of gray. And she has a dancer’s trim figure.

To understand the circle that her work has taken, she says, you have to understand how it began. The time was the early 1970s. The war in Vietnam dragged on. Women were fighting for the right to have an abortion and feminism was taking hold.

Married and the mother of three young boys, Gilligan had taken a part-time job teaching psychology at Harvard while her husband, Jim, taught psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School.

Gilligan’s early interviews led her to two realizations: that women think differently than men, and that women’s thinking was absent from the public debate.

In psychology, “I was put off by the way people talked about people ... because there didn’t seem to be a sufficient portrayal of the human world,” she recalls. “I really didn’t see how I could go on in psychology at the time, and so I had no ambition in terms of the university. I was able to do the kinds of studies that I would not have been able to do had I been trying to get tenure.” She became interested in exploring how adults tangled with moral dilemmas. She talked to men struggling over whether to fight in Vietnam and women considering abortion.

And she noticed that the women cast the rationale for their decisions in ways distinctly different from men’s and from the public debate raging at the time.

Publicly, the choice seemed to be between a woman’s right to choose what she does with her own body and an unborn child’s right to live. But women were suggesting instead that having a child at a time in their lives when they could not do a good job of parenting would be irresponsible.

“I talked to one woman whose husband was a roofer and didn’t make much money, and she had scoliosis of the spine,” Gilligan recalls. “Her choice had to do with what was the responsible thing to do in that situation.”

The interviews led her to two realizations. The first was that women think differently from the way men do. The second was that women’s thinking, their “voices,” were not absent from only the public debate. They were also missing from the psychological literature. All the developmental theories in the field--even those of her late Harvard teaching colleagues Erik Erikson and Lawrence Kohlberg--were based on studies of men and boys.

“The 1980 Handbook on Adolescent Psychology came out and said there wasn’t enough material on adolescent girls to fill one chapter,” Gilligan says, still incredulous.

She took the first steps toward filling that void in 1982 with the publication of her book In a Different Voice. Published by Harvard University Press, it became a best seller and has been translated into 12 languages.

In it, Gilligan claims that women think differently because they are more attuned to relationships and they practice an “ethic of caring.” They weigh decisions, in other words, based on how they affect the relationships in their lives rather than on absolutes of right and wrong as men tend to do. And women’s voices were not being heard, Gilligan contends, because to pay attention to them would mean changing the conversation--both in psychology and in the public arena.

From studying women, Gilligan and a team of researchers, primarily graduate students, began to work backwards, tracing the thinking and development of girls. Over more than a decade, the researchers interviewed hundreds of girls in private and public schools, in girls’ schools, and in coeducational settings.

But, rather than use traditional research methods, experiments, and psychological surveys to learn about girls, Gilligan simply opted to talk to them.

“One approach to psychology is that the human psyche is like a black box. You could perform experiments on it but you could never look into it,” says Judy Chu, a Harvard doctoral student who is collaborating with Gilligan on her research on boys. “One of the things that Carol says is that you can ask people and you can learn about their psyches. The method really trusts that the person knows what they know.”

Asked, “Do you really believe that?” some girls would respond, “Do you want to know what I really think?” and give a completely different answer.

The researchers developed relationships with the girls they were studying. They paid attention to the girls’ silences, the ways they referred to themselves, and the number of times they used certain phrases, such as “I don’t know,” as they did to their actual words.

For example, 12-year-old Anna said “I don’t know” 21 times in her initial interview. Two years later, however, the phrase popped up 135 times--even though the length of the interview was the same. The change, Gilligan believes, reflected Anna’s growing struggle to cope with what she thought and what she was supposed to think. Sometimes, the interviewers would follow a girl’s response to a question by asking, “Do you really believe that?” The prompt often spurred a turnaround: The girl would ask, “Do you want to know what I really think?” and then give a completely different answer.

Despite the accolades, however, some researchers criticize such methods.

“You can prove almost anything with stories. Just find the right people and you find the right stories,” says Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., whose book Who Stole Feminism challenges much of the current research in women’s studies. “I think she’s an engaging writer and imaginative, but I’m not sure what she does has much status as social science.”

Gilligan responds that if quantitative studies are the only kind that qualify as “research,” then Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, would not be considered a researcher.

“A lot of what we call methods in psychology research seems to me to be very surface-level,” she says.

What Gilligan and her Harvard colleagues found in their talks was that girls were very savvy and outspoken about human relations in their worlds. A 10-year-old in Boston, for example, said her home was “wallpapered with lies.”

Girls noticed, for example, when a female teacher disagreed with a colleague but failed to voice her disagreement. An 11-year-old knew her father’s tendencies toward violence stemmed from unhappiness over his prolonged unemployment.

But as they entered adolescence, girls begin to run into what Gilligan calls “the wall of Western culture.” They buried what they once saw so clearly about the relationships in their lives and began to affect a veneer of “niceness and goodness.” They feared to do otherwise--to voice anger or confront a friend--because, Gilligan concludes, that would mean losing the ties they had with their friends and families.

Though her work in private girls’ schools has been most prominent, she found that girls in public schools, and girls from working-class families and from differing racial and ethnic groups, expressed similar feelings. Some of those findings have been captured in some of Gilligan’s recent books, such as Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationship and Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (both from Harvard University Press).

Her work stops short, though, of offering concrete solutions aimed at helping girls cope with their inner struggles.

Still, she says there are steps educators can take to help girls negotiate the complicated terrain of adolescence. For starters, educators can be more aware--and more tolerant of--the differing paths that girls’ thinking can take.

Christina Hoff Sommers has criticized Gilligan’s emphasis on using stories and interviews to draw broad conclusions.

“In schools, some of the girls’ most brilliant work was coming into conflict with the accepted ways of reading poems and reading history,” she says. Rather than receive a bad grade for their unique spins on a subject, some of the girls the researchers met felt they almost had to write two papers---one for themselves and one for the grade books. One girl, in fact, did just that.

“But that’s doing double the work,” Gilligan says.

Women teachers, in particular, can also help by forging stronger bonds with the girls in their schools. In one three-year study of 26 girls in 8th, 9th, and 10th grades, only a few cited teachers when asked to name women other than their mothers who were important in their lives.

Amy M. Sullivan, a former doctoral student who worked with Gilligan on that project, asked the same question of 340 girls in eight schools around the country. Only 4 percent named a teacher.

“Girls said they wanted a connection with adult women teachers,” says Sullivan, who is now an instructor and research associate with Harvard Medical School. “But it seems schools are not really set up to support those relationships.”

Now, however, Gilligan believes that schools--and society--have become more sensitized to the voices of girls.

Such programs as “Take Our Daughters to Work Day,” a national event launched by the Washington-based AAUW, have drawn attention to the role of girls. All-female rock groups are music-industry hits. Movies are being made on the lives of adolescent girls. And, through much of the 1990s, women voters have played influential roles in deciding federal elections.

“It feels palpably different to me,” Gilligan says. “In 1998, girls are visible and audible in this culture.”

But as the mother of three sons, Gilligan also wonders if all the attention to girls that her work has helped garner might have inadvertently constricted the way society views boys.

“Once the work on girls came out ... some people started to say, well, women are relational and men are not,” she says. Yet studies on infants conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s suggested that both boys and girls at that age were emotionally attuned to their mothers.

In one such study, a group of British researchers used life-size video monitors arranged so that 2-month-old infants and their mothers could see each other on a screen instead of in person.

Without telling the subjects, the researchers occasionally disrupted the interaction between mother and child by replacing the live images with footage recorded just a few seconds earlier of either the mother or the baby. Both mother and infant picked up on and responded to the break in their relationships.

Could something, Gilligan wonders, be missing from the psychological literature on boys’ development? Did boys, at some point in their development, lose their ability to be empathic or to forge emotional bonds?

As the mother of three sons, Gilligan wonders if her research’s attention to girls has inadvertently constricted the way society views boys.

Gilligan wonders, for example, why boys in their preschool years start to fashion toy guns out of whatever they can find--even when their teachers and parents forbid playing with guns.

“You see this picture of a little boy with a stuffed bunny in one hand and a Lego gun in the other,” she says. “You could almost freeze-frame that moment in development.” If becoming a boy means becoming tough, Gilligan says, then boys may feel at an early age that they have to hide the part of themselves that is more caring or stereotypically feminine.

To find out more about what happens to boys in early childhood, Gilligan is beginning a study with Chu, her doctoral student. The two are observing boys once a week at a private school in nearby Watertown.

Another doctoral student, Ilina Singh, is also studying the use of Ritalin for boys who have been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and its effects on their mothers and the rest of their families. The disorder, which is often marked by an inability to sit still or pay attention, is diagnosed much more often in young boys than young girls.

Even though a raft of books is scheduled to be published on boys’ development in the coming months, Gilligan and Chu believe their study may yet plow new ground.

But this time around, the interviews will prove more difficult. Boys in preschool and primary school typically don’t have the language skills that adolescent girls have. Even so, the researchers plan to interview a small group of them in depth this spring.

Because the project is just getting under way, Gilligan is reluctant to share many of her observations. But her turn toward boys’ development worries some of her critics.

“She’s going to pathologize little boyhood,” predicts Sommers, who is herself writing a book on boys. “The vast majority of boys are healthy and thriving and don’t need workshops to get in touch with their feminine nature.”

It doesn’t help, Sommers adds, that the AAUW, in its most recent report on girls’ development, has backtracked some on its original advocacy of separate schools and classes for girls. In a report issued in March, the group said there was insufficient evidence that all-girls schools give girls any kind of academic edge.

Gilligan never advocated all-girls schools and never took part in the AAUW’s research. But critics who have long claimed that the university women’s group overstated its case are beginning to suggest that questions should be raised about the entire body of work in girls’ studies.

And, critics have wondered, if girls are so oppressed in school, why do many studies show that they get better report-card grades on average than boys? Among high-achieving students, however, girls continue to lag behind boys on standardized tests measuring math and science abilities.

“In many schools, a lot of people are scratching their heads because they’re saying that girls are taking the leadership positions in school, and girls are taking the lead scholastically, and does that mean the attention on girls is misdirected?” says Jill McLean Taylor, an associate professor of education and human services at Simmons College in Boston who collaborated with Gilligan on some of her earlier studies. “But I think it’s much too early to say that.”

If her hunches about boys are right, Gilligan says, they raise questions about the way society socializes both boys and girls. Do boys have to suppress their tender side when they’re initiated into masculinity? Do girls have to lose their “voices” in adolescence? Gilligan thinks not.

“I think it’s only necessary if you want to perpetuate a patriarchal structure,” Gilligan says. “Throughout history, psychologists have read patriarchy as nature.”