In a Human Voice: Carol Gilligan in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi

Broadcast 9 October, 2024. Duration: 1 hour 31 minutes

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Carol Gilligan’s landmark book In a Different Voice – the “little book that started a revolution” – brought women’s voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time.

Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn’t quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the ‘different voice’ (of care ethics), although initially heard as a ‘feminine’ voice, is in fact a ‘human voice’; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story.

In this special online event, held in anticipation of our major exhibition Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists, Gilligan will be in conversation with the exhibition curator and former Freud Museum Chair of Trustees, Lisa Appignanesi, to help articulate and amplify this ‘human voice’ that so urgently needs to be heard.

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Speakers:

Carol Gilligan is University Professor at New York University and the author of many works including In a Different Voice, Meeting at the Crossroads (with Lyn Mikel Brown), The Birth of Pleasure, Joining the Resistance, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (with Naomi Snider) and Darkness Now Visible (with David A. J. Richards). For over 30 years she was a member of the Harvard faculty and held the university’s first chair in Gender Studies. She was named one of Time magazine’s 25 most Influential People in 1996.

Lisa Appignanesi is Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, former President of English PEN and former Chair of the Freud Museum. Her many books include Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors and Losing the Dead. Her most recent book is Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love. She has written for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and The Guardian, as well as made radio and TV programmes, several on Freud. She is curating an exhibition around Freud’s Women which will open in the Freud Museum in 2024.