TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110890/1108992.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.4 KB | 189 lines

                                                                                SELF & SOCIETY, Page 64

Coming from a Different Place


Men and women just don't see things the same way. Some
surprising new studies of schoolgirls show why

By ANASTASIA TOUFEXIS -- Reported by Barbara Dolan/Chicago and
Melissa Ludtke/Boston


    "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."