Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. The book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology (based on loss in intimate life) and resistance to it (based on the love of equals) to the Roman Republic and Empire and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. Democratic resistance in religion, psychology, the arts, and politics rests on free voices challenging patriarchal restrictions on the love of equals. In addition to examining why we are at war, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad.

The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future

Gilligan, Carol

Richards, David A.J.

Cambridge University Press

More than any other psychologist, Carol Gilligan has helped us to hear girls' voices just when they seem to be blurring and fading or becoming disruptive during the passage into womanhood. When adolescent girls--once assured and resilient--silence or censor themselves to maintain relationships, they often become depressed, and develop eating disorders or other psychological problems. But when adolescent girls remain outspoken it is often difficult for others to stay in relationship with them, leading girls to be excluded or labeled as troublemakers. If this is true in an affluent suburban setting, where much of the groundbreaking research took place, what of girls from poor and working-class families, what of fading womanhood amid issues of class and race? And how might these issues affect the researchers themselves? In Between Voice and Silence Taylor, Gilligan, and Sullivan grapple with these questions. The result is a deeper and richer appreciation of girls' development and women's psychological health. 
 In an urban public school, among girls from diverse cultural backgrounds--African American, Hispanic, Portuguese, and white--and poor and working-class families, the authors sought a key to the relationship between risk, resistance, and girls' psychological development and health. Specifically, they found cultural differences that affect girls' coming of age in this country. In Between Voice and Silence, the story of the study parallels another, that of African American, Hispanic, and white women who gathered to examine their own differences and to learn how to avoid perpetuating past divisions among women. Together, these two stories reveal an intergenerational struggle to develop relationships between and among women and to hold and respect difference.

Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationships

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Sullivan, Amy

Taylor, Jill McLean

Mental Health

Harvard University Press

This is the little book that started a revolution. First published almost twenty years ago, it made women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond. Translated into sixteen languages, with more than three-quarters of a million copies sold around the world. In a Different Voice has inspired new research, new educational initiatives, and political debate-and helped many women and men to see themselves and each other in a different light. 
 Carol Gilligan believes that psychology has persistently and systematically misunderstood women--their motives, their moral commitments, the course of their psychological growth, and their special view of what is important in life. Here she sets out to correct psychology's misperceptions and refocus its view of female personality. The result is truly a tour de force, which may well reshape much of what psychology now has to say about female experience.

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

Self-Help

This is the little book that started a revolution, making women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond. Translated into sixteen languages, with more than 700,000 copies sold around the world, In a Different Voice has inspired new research, new educational initiatives, and political debate―and helped many women and men to see themselves and each other in a different light.Carol Gilligan believes that psychology has persistently and systematically misunderstood women―their motives, their moral commitments, the course of their psychological growth, and their special view of what is important in life. Here she sets out to correct psychology's misperceptions and refocus its view of female personality. The result is truly a tour de force, which may well reshape much of what psychology now has to say about female experience.

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

On the way to womanhood, what does a girl give up? For five years, Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, asking this question, listened to one hundred girls who were negotiating the rough terrain of adolescence. This book invites us to listen, too, and to hear in these girls' voices what is rarely spoken, often ignored, and generally misunderstood: how the passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence, disconnection, and dissembling, a troubled crossing that our culture has plotted with dead ends and detours. 
 In the course of their research, Brown and Gilligan developed a Listener's Guide - a method of following the pathways of girls' thoughts and feelings, of distinguishing what girls are saying by the way they say it. We witness the struggle girls undergo as they enter adolescence only to find that what they feel and think and know can no longer be said directly. We see them at a cultural impasse, and listen as they make the painful, necessary adjustments, outspokenness giving way to circumspection, self-knowledge to uncertainty, authority to compliance. These changes mark the edge of adolescence as a watershed in women's psychological development, a time of wrenching disjunctions between body and psyche, voice and desire, self and relationship. Brown and Gilligan open their method to us and share their discoveries as they encourage girls at different ages to speak about themselves in conversation with women. They follow some of these girls over time, listening to changes in their distinct voices from one year to the next, addressing their successes and failures as they confront one barrier after another. 
 This groundbreaking work offers major new insights into girls' development and women's psychology. But perhaps more importantly, it provides women with the means of meeting girls at the critical crossroads of adolescence, of harkening to the voices of girlhood and sustaining their sell-affirming notes.

Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development

Brown, Lyn Mikel

On the way to womanhood, what does a girl give up? For five years, Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, asking this question, listened to one hundred girls who were negotiating the rough terrain of adolescence. This book invites us to listen, too, and to hear in these girls' voices what is rarely spoken, often ignored, and generally misunderstood: how the passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence, disconnection, and dissembling, a troubled crossing that our culture has plotted with dead ends and detours. In the course of their research, Brown and Gilligan developed a Listener's Guide - a method of following the pathways of girls' thoughts and feelings, of distinguishing what girls are saying by the way they say it. We witness the struggle girls undergo as they enter adolescence only to find that what they feel and think and know can no longer be said directly. We see them at a cultural impasse, and listen as they make the painful, necessary adjustments, outspokenness giving way to circumspection, self-knowledge to uncertainty, authority to compliance. These changes mark the edge of adolescence as a watershed in women's psychological development, a time of wrenching disjunctions between body and psyche, voice and desire, self and relationship. Brown and Gilligan open their method to us and share their discoveries as they encourage girls at different ages to speak about themselves in conversation with women. They follow some of these girls over time, listening to changes in their distinct voices from one year to the next, addressing their successes and failures as they confront one barrier after another. This groundbreaking work offers major new insights into girls' development and women's psychology. But perhaps more importantly, it provides women with the means of meeting girls at the critical crossroads of adolescence, of harkening to the voices of girlhood and sustaining their sell-affirming notes.

Psychology & Counseling

The long-awaited new book by the world-renowned psychologist whose In a Different Voice, published two decades ago, started an intellectual revolution by showing that theories of human psychology, based on studies of men, had overlooked and distorted basic aspects of the human experience. Now, in The Birth of Pleasure, Carol Gilligan, once again breaking through imprisoning tradition, writes about love and the forces that stand in the way of pleasure. She shows us why love between a man and a woman is so often burdened by a history of loss and how it can be freed and opened to the pursuit of happiness. Tracing a lineage from Greek mythology to our own most intimate relationships, she asks why we relive tragic stories of loss and betrayal; drawing on her own research, she offers a radical new map of love. Within the sweep of this adventurous book, Gilligan becomes our guide on a journey that takes us through novels and dreams, ancient legends and contemporary research, to an illumination of modern couples in crisis. She shows us how, although the liberation movements of the twentieth century have challenged old patriarchal structures, the underlying patterns remain: the early channeling of boys into “masculinity,” the double consciousness of girls in adolescence, the silences between men and women, the split between our social and inner selves. In the haunting love story of Psyche and Cupid, Gilligan discovers a crucial tale of resistance—letting us see how a path leading toward tragedy can be turned into a road leading to pleasure. Open, accessible, and rich with emotion, the book rings with the voices of girls and boys, mothers, fathers, and lovers. Gilligan draws on Shakespeare’s plays, Freud’s case histories, and the novels of Hawthorne, Proust, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, and Arundhati Roy to illuminate critical points on the map. Her pioneering scholarship, superb writing, revolutionary argument, and stunning conclusion will make The Birth of Pleasure one of the important and enduring books of our time. "Why has the love story in Western culture long assumed that pleasure leads to death, that love leads to loss? Carol Gilligan, in this brilliantly written book, explores the history of these associations, then traces the roots of an alternative narrative and draws a map to send us on our way. This is a wonderful book!" —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Afro-American Studies Department, Harvard University "The Birth of Pleasure is a revolutionary book that will transform our beliefs about love, pleasure, human possibility, and ourselves. Carol Gilligan is a thinker and prophet of luminous grace, courage, and compassion."—Catharine Stimpson, University Professor and Dean, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, New York University "With poetic eloquence and fiery passion, Carol Gilligan may well be on the way to wresting pleasure from the brutal heart of patriarchy. Her book does no less than reconfigure what it might mean to love and be loved, a revolutionary act in itself." —Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues

The Birth of Pleasure

KNOPF

Carol Gilligan, whose classic In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of human psychology, now offers a brilliant, provocative book about love. Why is love so often associated with tragedy, she asks. Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns? Gilligan observes children at play and adult couples in therapy and discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us. She finds evidence in new psychological research and traces a path leading from the myth of Psyche and Cupid through Shakespeare’s plays and Freud’s case histories, to Anne Frank’s diaries and contemporary novels. Groundbreaking and immensely readable, The Birth of Pleasure has powerful implications for the way we live and love.

The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Joining the Resistance

Since the publication of her landmark book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan has transformed the way we think about women and men and the relations between them. It was ‘the little book that started a revolution’, and with more than 800,000 copies in print it has become one of the most widely read and influential books ever written on gender and human development. 
In her new book Joining the Resistance Carol Gilligan reflects on the evolution of her thinking and shows how her key ideas were interwoven with her own life experiences. Her work began with the question of voice: who is speaking to whom, in what body, telling what stories about which relationships? By listening carefully she heard a voice that had been held in silence, and in the process realized the extent to which we – both women and men – had been telling false stories about ourselves. In her subsequent work Gilligan found that adolescent girls resisted pressures to disengage themselves from their honest voices, and by joining their resistance she opened the way for the development of a more humane way of thinking about personal and political relationships. For the central conviction of her work today – and the central thesis of this book – is that the requisites for love and the requisites for citizenship in a democratic society are one and the same. Both voice and the desire to live in relationships inherent in our human nature, together with the capacity to resist false authority. Combining autobiographical reflection with an analysis of key questions about gender and human development, this timely and highly readable book by one of America’s greatest contemporary thinkers will appeal to a wide readership.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Polity

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gilligan, Carol. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gilligan, Carol

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gilligan, Carol. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future

Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationships

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

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

Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development

Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development

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

The Birth of Pleasure

The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love

Joining the Resistance