Author Q&A

The Birth of Pleasure
by Carol Gilligan

(Page 3 of 5)

Q: Why did you decide to write this book?

A: Writing this book was a personal journey for me. After I wrote In a Different Voice, I remember thinking that there was a conversation under the conversation, and it had to do with love. All those concepts-self, morality, development-they were standing in a field, and the ground they were standing on was love. I wanted to write about love. I began to collect things-the myth of Psyche and Cupid, couples in crisis, girls, novels-and move them around. A friend who is a sculptor composes some of her work with pieces you can move around, and as I assembled the pieces of this book, experimenting with different angles of composition, I felt I was coming to see into love. As I listened to people's stories about love and heard certain themes over and over again, I realized that if I could capture what I was hearing, there was a story to tell that would make sense of experiences that seemed baffling or mysterious.

Q: In a Different Voice, published in 1982, proved to be a bestseller and a major influence. How has your life and work changed since the publication of that book? Did the reaction to the book surprise you?

A: At the time I wrote the book, we had moved to a new house and with my children, I planted a large organic garden. I remember finishing the book and wanting to plant it in my garden, to shelter it from the world. I never imagined the response. I thought most people would not want to hear what I was saying, and I saw how easily it could be misconstrued. I did not anticipate being joined in the way I have been by so many people, including people whose lives, at least on the surface, seem so different from mine. In a Different Voice shows how including women's voices changes the human conversation, makes it more expansive, more real in certain ways, and that's not only for women; enlarging the conversation and changing the resonance can also encourage men to say things that they know but may have felt they couldn't speak about.

Did it change my life? Sure. It gave me a network of friends all over the world; I felt my perceptions were understood. It encouraged me to go further and to continue taking risks in my work.

Q: How do you see your work within the trajectory of feminist thought? What have been the key developments for women between In a Different Voice and The Birth of Pleasure?

A: There are two main trajectories of feminism-equality feminism and difference feminism, although actually when you think about it they are more like two steps in a dance. Equality feminism is pretty much summed up by the statement "Women's Rights are Human Rights." Seems self-evident to me. Once you agree that women are human, you get into the questions of difference feminism which are at the center of my work. What difference does it make when women enter arenas of the human world from which they were previously excluded? What do women add, what new perceptions, experiences, insights and knowledge do they bring? It's one thing to say to women, you can come into my house, you can come into every room of my house, but it's still my house. It's another to say, let's redesign the house.

I think the key development for women over the past twenty years has been that more and more women have become aware of the need to redesign the house. Certainly more women have entered men's houses, and then discovered that the structure requires them to do what men traditionally have done. One could say that women in this sense have become obsolete, like dinosaurs, since women or at least some women can be like men, but this only points to another key development during this time which has been that the old images and meanings of manhood and womanhood are themselves becoming obsolete. This is very hopeful because it means that the structures that have accommodated and promulgated patriarchy are changing.

Q: How has your research shaped this book? What about your students? Have they played a part in the development of your studies?

A: This book is personal research; it's a record of a personal journey of coming to know. While I draw on my past academic research, this is in no way a research monograph. When I draw examples from my research with girls or boys or my work with couples, my intention is to show something I came to see which shifted my thinking.

All of my academic research has been collaborative, and students have been outstanding collaborators, bringing fresh perceptions, new questions, and taking me into worlds I otherwise might not have seen. In laying out the frame for The Birth of Pleasure, an essential piece was the work with young boys that I did with Judy Chu, a graduate student. It was Chu's relationships with the boys, her insights, and the evidence of her research that made the analogy with the adolescent girls persuasive to me. Also, the "I poems" in the book which serve as sonograms of the psyche are part of a research method that my graduate students and I developed over many years, and specifically, the discovery that the first-person voice when followed through a passage often falls into a poetic cadence was the contribution of Elizabeth Debold, one of the key members of the Harvard Project. The five books reporting the research of the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development were co-authored or co-edited with my students, and each collaborator now heads her own research team.

Copyright © 2003 by Carol Gilligan

About the Author

Carol Gilligan is a psychologist and writer who lives in New York City and in the Berkshires. Her ground-breaking book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory' and Women's Development, has been translated into eighteen languages. With her students, she co-authored and co-edited four books on women's psychology and girls' development: Meeting at the Crossroads, Between Voice and Silence, Making Connections, and Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance. At Harvard, where she was the first Graham Professor of Gender Studies, her award-winning research led to the founding of the university's Center on Gender and Education. She is now University Professor at New York University.