Carol Gilligan listens to voices. The feminist psychologist first put together her ideas on what she was hearing and what she wasn?t, in a controversial study called "In a Different Voice".
It drew her further into research on what she calls the natural, the authentic voice, of girls and boys. She is searching for, and frustrated with, that moment when society warps and suppresses the true expression of self.
Her latest tract on voice, a book called "The Birth of Pleasure", is beyond social science. It?s part personal journal, as much philosophy as psychology, and it offers hope. A suggestion that society may be entering a time when the way we define ourselves as girls and boys, women and men, lovers and parents, could change.
