Coming From A Different Place

By Anastasia Toufexis

It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex...It is the masculine values that prevail.

So wrote the novelist Virginia Woolf in 1929. In societies where male standards are considered normative, those female values have been viewed not only as secondary but also as somehow defective: based on emotion rather than reason, intuition rather than logic; ultimately incapable -- as Sigmund Freud suggested -- of shaping ethical judgments.

Times, happily, change. Today the interior lives of women are being intensely scrutinized by a band of educators and ethicists, linguists and psychologists. Far from being deficient, their studies show, women are as fully developed psychologically as men, and their ethical judgments are equally valid. The reality is that women experience life differently from men; consequently, they think differently. In the words of Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, a central figure in this dynamic research movement, they have "a different voice."

At the crux of women's existence, the researchers contend, is the sense of relationship, the interconnectedness of people. That notion challenges long- accepted theories of human psychological development. As set out by Freud and his largely male successors, healthy emotional growth is marked by a striving for autonomy. People who deviate from that pattern, as many women do, have often been considered immature, even psychologically ill -- victims, perhaps, of dependent personality disorder. But critics charge that that orthodox psychological dogma is based almost exclusively on studies of men. Ignoring women distorted the picture. The male voice, in effect, became the human voice.

A number of scholars, most of them female, are redressing the balance. Abandoning standard research techniques that emphasize impersonal inquiries, they engage women in long conversational dialogues exploring friendships, sexual desires, classroom experiences, racial identity, ideas of justice. What they are discovering is that women's psychological equilibrium depends on human connection. The terror for women is isolation. Psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller of Wellesley College's Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies and the author of a seminal 1976 book, Toward a New Psychology of Women, says, "Women's sense of self and of worth is grounded in the ability to make and maintain relationships." When men try to kill themselves, it is commonly out of an injured sense of pride or competence, often related to work. When women attempt suicide, it is usually because of failures involving lovers, family or friends.

Relationship colors every aspect of a woman's life, according to the researchers. Women use conversation to expand and understand relationships; men use talk to convey solutions, thereby ending conversation. Women tend to see people as mutually dependent; men view them as self-reliant. Women emphasize caring; men value freedom. Women consider actions within a context, linking one to the next; men tend to regard events as isolated and discrete.

Those differing values inform the way women approach ethical dilemmas, argues Gilligan, who oversees Harvard's Project on the Psychology of Women and the Development of Girls. On same-sex teams in grade-school sports, she notes, when a boy is injured he is removed from the field and the game continues. Among girls, when a teammate is hurt the game stops.

On matters of justice, women are less concerned about abstract rights or wrongs and more interested in finding compromises that maintain the social contract. In her provocative 1982 book In a Different Voice, Gilligan offered an example. A boy and a girl, both 11, were asked whether a poor man should steal a drug that would save his wife's life. Yes, said the boy, because human life is worth more than property. No, said the girl, who suggested that he borrow the money or work out a payment schedule with the druggist. Her reasoning: If the man stole, he might end up in jail -- and then where would his wife be?

Women's commitment to alliances and consensus is shaped early. Through age 3, girls and boys behave similarly. But at age 4, boys begin to break their dependence on their mother or caretaker. Girls, meanwhile, immerse themselves in intimacy and are trained to be empathic.

Girls appear to reach another critical juncture at adolescence. Drawing on interviews with youngsters in Boston and students at public and private schools -- including the Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y., and the Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio -- Gilligan and her collaborators conclude that girls reach a psychological impasse around age 11 when they confront the conventions of a male-dominated culture. They discover that their intense awareness of intimacy is not highly prized, even though society perceives women as caring and altruistic. The dilemma, says Gilligan, is that "for girls to remain responsive to themselves, they must resist the conventions of feminine goodness; to remain responsive to others, they must resist the values placed on self-sufficiency and independence."

Presented with a choice that makes them appear either selfish or selfless, many "silence" their distinctive voice. They become less confident and more tentative in offering their opinions -- a trait that often persists into adulthood. "We start to hear the breathy voice," says Gilligan. "After a while, they speak in a way that's disconnected from how they are really feeling." Speech becomes punctuated with passive "I don't knows." Consider Anna. At age 12, the insidious words cropped up only 21 times during an interview. By age 14, they numbered 135.

The result of girls burying their knowledge, says psychologist Lyn Mikel Brown, a member of the Harvard project, "is self-doubt, ambivalence, panic and loss." Researchers link this confusion to the prevalence among teenage girls of depression and eating disorders.

Some critics argue that Gilligan and her colleagues overemphasize the importance of gender. "Gilligan's wrong about any sex differences in moral thought," declares Eleanor Maccoby, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford. What the revisionist scholars are mapping, she contends, is the influence of socialization -- meaning that society expects different things from the sexes and trains them differently. Class, education or ethnic background may be more important than sex in shaping psychological growth. The new theorists are "overgenderizing," says Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, a sociologist at City University of New York. "Seeing distinctions and stereotyping are so much a part of our culture."

But the most explosive aspect of the new research is its political implications. Some of Gilligan's critics fear that her findings reinforce stereotypes -- women as nurturing, sacrificing and peaceable -- and thus undermine the struggle for equality. They note, for example, that people- oriented jobs in which women dominate, such as nursing and teaching, are invariably on the low end of the pay scale. Catharine MacKinnon, law professor at the University of Michigan, calls Gilligan's different voice "the voice of a victim."

In reply, revisionist researchers argue that their work offers a way to liberate women and transform society. If women's approach to life is acknowledged as authentic, they will no longer need to act like men. "What we are doing is more revolutionary than early feminism," declares psychologist Judith Jordan, co-founder of the women's studies program at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. "We believe that the culture, which has been one of power, objectification and violence, has to change. Women's sensitivity to relationship offers a special gift in making that occur."

That may sound a bit overblown, but there are a few areas where the findings are having some influence. Educators are beginning to reconsider teaching methods in order to take advantage of women's sense of relationship. For example, at the Emma Willard School, the entire curriculum has been revised to emphasize cooperative learning rather than individual competition and to encourage girls to analyze and express ideas from their own perspective rather than parrot back the accepted dogma. In psychology, distant, impersonal therapists are gradually giving way to more empathic and active listeners who are better able to help women scarred by battering or sexual abuse.

But a major obstacle in pursuing change remains. As Gilligan sees it, the language of our culture "hasn't been able to represent difference without hierarchy. For us to do that, it is really necessary to have a change in language." A former dancer, she reaches for a musical metaphor to suggest how the contrasting voices of men and women might blend. "One can think of the oboe and the clarinet as different," she says. "Yet when they play together, there is a sound that's not either one of them, but it doesn't dissolve the identity of either instrument."

With reporting by Barbara Dolan/Chicago and Melissa Ludtke/Boston