Selective Hearing

Sizing Up Gilligan’s "In a Different Voice"

A major point of critique of Carol Gilligan’s influential text was the author’s skirting of the other two components of the holy Trinity of identity politics--namely, race and class. This follows from the less talked about critique of contemporary feminism (that is, feminist academics) with its focus on “patriarchy” and its skewing in the direction of those concerns that are most relevant to white middle-class women. The same criticism, it would seem to me, could be leveled at Gilligan, with some justification and perhaps with no small amount of return for one’s efforts. This can be done most fortuitously if one exploits the abortion issue for this purpose.

All hyperbole aside, there is no denying that our country is divided on the abortion issue. We tend to all have complex feelings about a very complex issue. This no less true for women as it is for men. There is a sense of the agonizing that is done over the issue that comes across in Gilligan’s book. But in her failure to make concrete the abstractions of the women she interviews, perhaps for the sake of her argument, we never get a sense of the moral positions her interviewees hold or how they had come to hold them. Instead we get snippets of interviews which she comments and elaborates upon, often seeing things in the answers given that really aren’t there.

I especially believe that the interviews dealing with abortion were particularly skewed, perhaps from the git-go. An urban-based abortion clinic’s demographics can hardly be universalized — especially with regard to Gilligan’s study. Unlike Kristen Luker, whose Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood should be read in the wake of Gilligan, Gilligan fails to construct the social worlds of her subjects. The complex relationship that is bound to exist between the social values of those worlds and the views of the individual are only explored superficially. Thus, she is unable to see how “moral positions on abortion are intimately tied to views on sexual behavior, the care of children, family life, technology, and the importance of the individual” (Luker, back cover). We fail to see how a black woman living in the rural parts of Arkansas could have a position on abortion from her counterpart living in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.

As Luker illustrates, race and class do matter. Women are not at all of one voice on this issue, nor are they on many others. The problem this creates for Gilligan’s conclusion and solution are poignant indeed. For if we men are to strive to be “more like women,” then we must ask: which women? Do we pick women of our class background? Our race? Or is the application of any of the three branches of identity politics to our methodology problematical? I would answer “yes” to the last question, for reasons that I hope to explore in other writings here and elsewhere.