In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development

"This book is truly amazing. For any woman who feels she has lost clarity and fierceness and the ability to tell the truth about how she feels and what is going on in the world of feelings and relationships, the social world which she inhabits, read Gilligan's work (any of it). The book made me remember what it was to learn to be nice and quiet and feminine in order to become a 'woman' when as a girl it had been much more OK to be more forthright, and more myself. Interesting both in terms of looking at the psychology of the world of teenage girls and their lived experience, in terms of engaging with social and psychological research through an engaged methodology of relationship which disturbs the usual authoritarian role of researchers, and in terms of the real and lived effects of gender roles and norms on young girls as they 'become' women, not in theory but in practice. It'll make you long for the freedom of life before you were conforming to the ways of being which are acceptable for 'a woman' and remember the amazing gifts which girls and women have to offer, which end up being hidden away and covered over in order to 'fit in' and which become harder and harder to get in touch with the more they are disavowed and disallowed. Every woman should read it, every girl should read it, every parent should read it, every teacher. Men who find women's lack of assertiveness irritating should read it to find out how women end up that way too... Highly recommended."
~ Written on 2003-06-03