Carol Gilligan

In her book In a Different Voice Gilligan presented her ethics of care theory as an alternative to Lawrence Kohlberg's hierarchal and principled approach to ethics. In contrast to Kohlberg, who claimed that girls, and therefore also women, did not in general develop their moral abilities to the highest levels, Gilligan argued that women approached ethical problems differently from men. According to Gilligan, women's moral viewpoints center around the understanding of responsibilities and relationship whilst men's moral viewpoints instead center around the understanding of moral fairness, which is tied to rights and rules. Women also tend to see moral issues as a problem of conflicting responsibilities rather than competing rights. So whilst women perceive the situation as more contextual and narrative, men define the situation as more formal and abstract. In her 2011 article about In a Different Voice, Gilligan says she has made "a distinction [she] ha[s] come to see as pivotal to understanding care ethics. Within a patriarchal framework, care is a feminine ethic. Within a democratic framework, care is a human ethic. A feminist ethic of care is a different voice within a patriarchal culture because it joins reason with emotion, mind with body, self with relationships, men with women, resisting the divisions that maintain a patriarchal order". She calls the different moral approaches "ethics of care" and "ethics of justice" and recognizes them as fundamentally incompatible.

Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice (1982), which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.

Gilligan studied women's psychology and girls' development and co-authored or edited a number of texts with her students. She contributed the piece "Sisterhood Is Pleasurable: A Quiet Revolution in Psychology" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan. She published her first novel, Kyra, in 2008. In 2015, Gilligan taught for a semester at New York University in Abu Dhabi.

Gilligan eventually left Harvard in 2002 to join New York University as a full professor with the School of Education and the School of Law. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge in the Centre for Gender Studies from 2003 until 2009.

In early fall of 2002, Gilligan released a theater adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, originally written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The play first opened on September 14, 2002 at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. While most of the story's content remained the same, Gilligan used the play as a vehicle to present many of the concepts on which she had been working. She related how the patriarchy not only maintains strict gender roles, but also how it prevents true pleasure in relationships between people. Gilligan said that Hawthorne was demonstrating that "you could overthrow kings, and still the tension between puritanical society and love and passion would continue". In Gilligan's adaption, she suggested that we have inherited Pearl's world where women do not necessarily have to worry about having an "A" on their breasts.

In 1996, Time magazine listed her among America's 25 most influential people. She is considered the originator of the ethics of care.

Gilligan and Kristin Linklater co-founded an all-female theater group called the Company of Women in 1991.

Together, James and Carol had three children; Jonathan M. Gilligan, Tim Gilligan, and Christopher Gilligan. Jonathan M. Gilligan is an Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Jonathan has also collaborated with his mother, to write the play The Scarlet Letter (a feminist adaptation of Hawthorne's novel) and the libretto for the opera Pearl. Christopher Gilligan was born in 1966 and graduated from Harvard University cum laude with a concentration in History. Christopher is now the Associate Chief Medical Officer of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Director of the Brigham and Women's Spine Center.

She began her teaching career as a lecturer at the University of Chicago from 1965 to 1966, teaching the Introduction to Modern Social Science. She then became a lecturer at Harvard University in 1967, lecturing on General Education. After becoming an assistant professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1971, she received tenure there in 1988 as a full professor. Gilligan taught for two years at the University of Cambridge (from 1992 to 1994) as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions and as a visiting professorial fellow in the Social and Political Sciences. In 1997, she became Patricia Albjerg Graham Chair in Gender Studies at Harvard. From 1998 until 2001, she was a Visiting Meyer Professor and later visiting professor at New York University School of Law.

After entering the dialogue regarding women and morality in the 1960s, Gilligan published what is considered one of her most influential works in 1982. Before she conducted her research Gilligan knew that "psychologists had assumed a culture in which men were the measure of humanity, and autonomy and rationality ('masculine' qualities) were the markers of maturity. It was a culture that counted on women not speaking for themselves". To explore this theory further, Gilligan conducted her research using an interview method. Her questions centered around the self, morality and how women handle issues of conflict and choice. Her three studies that she references throughout the work were the college student study (moral development), the abortion decision study (experience of conflict), and the rights and responsibilities study (concepts of self and morality across men and women of different ages). From these studies Gilligan formed the framework for her ethics of care.

Carol Gilligan (/ˈɡɪlɪɡən/; born November 28, 1936) is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships.