Books In Review

In a Different Voice by Carol Gilligan, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982. $18.00 180 pages.

by Beverly Currie

Women working in the field of adult education will be interested in Carol Gilligan's new book, In a Different Voice. Dr. Gilligan, an Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, presents a thoughtful critique of the established theories of developmental psychology. Theories by Eric Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Sigmund Freud provide the underpinnings to the philosophy and practice of adult education. All have in common the goal of clarifying the process of human psychological motivation, each also portrays the mature human person as one who is autonomous, self-reliant, and self-directed.

Maturity defined in these terms is difficult for most women in our society to achieve. Our identities are women into a complex web of relationships with family, friends, and work mates. The male ideal of adulthood excludes these. One of Dr. Gilligan's major conclusions that correct theories of psychological development are biased against women is by no means new. The theorists mentioned above at best omit women's psychological development from their theories. At worst, they describe differences in women's identity formation as deviant or inferior. Interdependence constitutes a retarded stage of growth when separation and detachment are held up as developmental goals. When the norm for human development is restricted to a patriarchal point of view, such conclusions are inevitable.

Carol Gilligan challenges this skewed perspective. She offers a celebrative re-interpretation of women's psychological development to counter the current paradigms that exclude or trivialize women's experience. Her interviews with women contemplating abortion illustrate very different perceptions of the self and its relationship to other people. The crisis of an unwanted pregnancy reveals a conflict between responsibilities: caring vs. responsibility and choice. In order to resolve the crisis, conceptions of caring must expand to include the self as well as others. The two are fundamentally interconnected. The traditional association of caring with femininity and responsibility and choice with masculinity and adulthood is unfounded, in this context.

In a Different Voice attempts to transform our current metaphors of psychological growth and development. Its author recognizes that explanations of human development incorporate values. Some experiences and conceptions of reality are emphasized while others are ignored depending on the observer's vantage point. Carol Gilligan transposes our thinking about human development into a different key, one capable of including a wider range of voices. In acknowledging a greater variety of experience and modes of thinking, her develop-mental theory can legitimately claim the label 'human'. Bev Currie is a graduate student in the Department of Adult Education at OISE and an active member of CCLOW.