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

“The brief excerpt from Chekhov’s play suggests that when the observer is a woman, the perspective may be of a different sort.”

Gilligan begins with an excerpt from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, in which Lopahin, a young businessman, describes the vastness of the natural world to Madame Ranevskaya, whose cherry orchard he will later buy. He tells her how he fantasizes of men being giants, to which Madame Ranevskaya interrupts him, saying that giants are only good in fairy tales and are frightening anywhere else. That Gilligan begins her book with literature speaks to her interest in storytelling and also the human voice, which she will study throughout In a Different Voice in detail, sometimes as if women’s dialogue with her is a literary text in itself. The desire to be a giant, too, is indicative of the vastness of masculine epistemologies that Gilligan argues have downplayed feminine epistemologies.

“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 in the social sciences. The discovery occurs when theories formerly considered to be sexually neutral in their scientific objectivity are found instead to reflect a consistent observational and evaluative bias. Then the presumed neutrality of science, like that of language itself, gives way to the recognition that the categories of knowledge are human constructions.”

Gilligan began writing In a Different Voice in the early ’70s, when efforts at ending discrimination against women were gaining momentum. Here she claims that science, while supposedly neutral, is actually subjective because it is dominated by men and their gendered ways of thinking and experiencing the world. As a result, these masculine approaches have been presented as “human” ones at the exclusion of women, especially regarding