Carol Gilligan Quotations

In the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection.

At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered.

The hardest times for me were not when people challenged what I said, but when I felt my voice was not heard.

I've found that if I say what I'm really thinking and feeling, people are more likely to say what they really think and feel. The conversation becomes a real conversation.

It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve - a story which shows among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble.

I find the question of whether gender differences are biologically determined or socially constructed to be deeply disturbing.

The women's movement is taking a different form right now, and it is because it has been so effective and so successful that there's a huge counter movement to try to stop it, to try to divide women from one another, to try to almost foment divisiveness.

Certain issues have been associated with contemporary feminism and in a certain sense circumscribed for that reason.

Many women have told me they remember where they were when they read the book, and how they felt suddenly that what they really thought or felt about things made sense.

Women have traditionally deferred to the judgment of men although often while intimating a sensibility of their own which is at variance with that judgment.

Trust grows when babies and mothers establish that they can find each other again after the inevitable moments of losing touch. It is not the goodness of the mother or the relationship per se that is the basis for trust; it is the ability of mother and baby together to repair the breaks in their relationship that builds a safe house for love.

Everything about women is in perpetual crisis.

Theory can blind observation.

Pleasure is a sensation. It is written into our bodies; it is our experience of delight, of joy. ... Pleasure will become a marker, a compass pointing to emotional true north.

The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life.

I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy.

Both love and democracy depend on voice -- having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard.

For a man to be a man, did he have to be a soldier, or at least prepare himself for war? For a woman to be a woman, did she have to be a mother, or at least prepare herself to raise children? Soldiers and mothers were the sacrificial couple, honored by statues in the park, lauded for their willingness to give their lives to others.

My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. Because these languages share an overlapping moral vocabulary, they contain a propensity for systematic mistranslation ...

While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equality—that everyone should be treated the same—an ethic of care rests on the premise of nonviolence—that no one should be hurt.

Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows.

While men represent powerful activity as assertion and aggression, women in contrast portray acts of nurturance as acts of strength.

It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve -a story which shows among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble

I don't see myself as an icon. I was very moved by the response to my book; it brought me into relationship with many people whom I otherwise would not have met. I also discovered that in becoming a public figure, I became a focus for all kinds of projections that had little to do with me.