Carol Gilligan
Hailed by George Gilder
In a Different Voice
The Economy of Eros
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Carol Gilligan
Hailed by George Gilder
In a Different Voice
The Economy of Eros
The woman's role is nothing less than the hub of the human community. All other work -- the business and politics and entertainment and service performed in the society -- finds its ultimate test in the quality of the home.Gilder on Gilligan
The central position of the woman in the home parallels her central position in all civilized society. Both derive from her necessary role in procreation and from the most primary and inviolable of human ties, the one between mother and child.
Most of the characteristics we define as humane and individual originate in the mother's love for her children. Men have no ties to the long-term human community so deep or so tenacious as the mother's to her child.
[The mother] is the vessel of the ultimate values of the nation. The community is largely what she is and what she demands of men.
Eshet Chayil
אשת חיל
A Woman of Valor
Proverbs 31 : 10In a Different Voice: Carol Gilligan
Carol Gilligan of Harvard, the noted feminist, is solidly praised by Gilder for much of her insight.
Gilder endorses Gilligan's assertion that there is a "uniquely feminine moral sense rooted in webs of relationship and responsibility, in intimacy and caring, rather than in rules and abstractions.
Stemming from her umbilical link to new life itself and from her passionate sense of the value and potential of that life, the woman's morality is the ultimate basis of all morality.
Sexual liberalism is the cause, not the solution, of the problem of the West. The pursuit of promiscuous sexual pleasures [as an alternative to the duties of family life] leads chiefly to misery and despair. It is procreation that ultimately makes sex gratifying and important and it is home and family that give resonance and meaning to life.
The woman's place is in the home, and she does her best when she can get the man there, too, inducing him to submit most human activity to the domestic values of civilization. Thus in a sense she also brings the home into the society. The radiance of the values of home can give meaning and illumination to male enterprises. Male work is most valuable when it is imbued with the long-term love and communal concerns of femininity, when it is brought back to the home. Otherwise, masculine activity is apt to degenerate quickly to the level of a game; and, unless closely regulated, games have a way of deteriorating into the vain pursuit of power.
In a state of nature
[The male youth yearns to escape to a primal mode of predatory and immediate excitement. His most powerful impulse is a combination of lust and wanderlust. He surrenders it only with pain. ]
But with the ideal of civilization
The male renounces unbridled sexual freedom and self-expression in order to serve a woman and family for a lifetime. Gilder writes: This male sacrifice, no less than the woman's work in the home, is essential to civilization.
It is women's judgment that tames the aggressive pursuits of men. Men come to learn that their activity will be best received if it partakes of the values of the home. If they think the work is unworthy, they try to conceal it and bring home the money anyway.... But in almost every instance, even by hypocrisy, they pay tribute to the moral superiority of women. women
In rediscovering for the secular world this feminine morality, rooted in 'webs of relationship,' Gilligan has written an important book. What she and the male moralists she criticizes do not see is that the self-sacrifice of women finds a perfect complement in the self-sacrifice of men. On this mutual immolation is founded the fulfillment of human civilization and happiness.
For just as it is the sacrifice of early career ambitions and sexual freedom that makes possible the true fulfillment of women, it is the subordination of male sexuality to women's maternity that allows the achievement of male career goals, that spurs the attainment of the highest male purposes. In his vaunted freedom and sexual power, the young single man may dream of glory. But it is overwhelmingly the married men who achieve it in the modern world. They achieve it, as scripture decrees and women's experience insists, by self-denial and sacrifice.Susan Faludi says of Carol Gilligan, that her book "In a Different Voice" (1982) is "one of the most widely quoted and influential feminist works of the '80s."
Interestingly, Faludi notes, a great measure of the appeal of Gilligan's Different Voice is purely aesthetic. The work is simply beautiful, in a stylistic and literary sense. "In a large part, the popularity of Gilligan's book was due to its elegant prose and its many literary allusions to Chekhov, Tolstoy, and George Eliot" .... The lyrical writing [was] a rarity for a psychological text.
Margaret Mead found (studying South Sea cultures) that women are most contented not when they are granted "influence, power, and wealth," but rather when "the female role of wife and mother is exalted." A devaluing of women's role, Mead wrote, make women become unhappy in the home.[Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world. 1949]
Debunking Gilder and the Reaganite "Men's Movement"
Faludi delved into the somewhat tortured development of the youthful George Gilder as he groped for answers in the midst of his own personal quest for love and for self-esteem. Having formerly called himself a feminist, Gilder sought fame as "America's Number-One Antifeminist." One gathers that beneath the conservative adulation of Ideal Womanhood and particularly of maternal femininity and beauty, there is also (as Faludi discerns) a lurking misogyny -- or at least a Victorian-style sexism and male chauvinism.
Faludi objects [p339] to the distorted use which conservatives and traditionalists have made of Carol Gilligan's insights. In her book, Gilligan's aim was to show how women's moral development has been devalued and misrepresented by male psychological researchers, how ethics has been defined only in male terms. Since at least the '50s, Gilligan observes, researchers have evaluated women's and men's ability to make moral judgments on the basis of a single all-male study [developed by Lawrence Kohlberg]. Gilligan's contribution is her insight that "women are more likely to make moral choices within the context of particular situations and out of concern for specific individuals -- rather than on the basis of impersonal rules of fairness and rights. This does not make women's morality 'immature' she says -- just different.
"Very much against her will, Gilligan became the expert the [conservative] backlash media loved to quote." [Faludi, p342]
In 1991 Susan Faludi responded to the anti-feminist backlash of rising conservatism of the Reagan years.
The World Will Be Saved By Beauty
Dostoyevsky said: the world will be saved by beauty
Mainstream media can't help itself. It just has to mock Sarah Palin's natural affinity for black guys -- and just tell me what is wrong with that? Even front runner Herman Cain is not exempt from the infatuation that the media has for Palin's fatal attraction for black guys. They just won't leave it alone. But from a political stand point, hardly anyone denies that the only hope for Republicans is the natural alliance between women and black men. Sen. Lindsey Graham says, we can't win with only old white men. Reince Priebus says, Republicans have got to attract minorities and women.
Why does Mitt Romney "inspire such angry contempt" among my fellow conservatives? asked Michael Medved. They'll tell you it's because he's a "gutless, unprincipled moderate," but the real reason is more troubling. Romney just doesn't reflect the "rage and paranoia" that have deformed the GOP since Barack Obama's election. In 2008, the former Massachusetts governor won the support of Rush Limbaugh and every other talk-radio conservative; Laura Ingraham even called Romney a "conservative's conservative." Since then, Romney has only solidified his conservative credentials. So why the stubborn refusal to accept him as the party's best candidate? It's a matter of style. Romney is "cool and collected, reasonable and restrained," while the Right wants a candidate who embodies its fury and disgust. After three year's of Obama's "self-infatuated grandiosity," conservatives long for the political equivalent of Conan the Barbarian -- an avenger who will lay waste to Obama and the liberal agenda once and for all. Obviously, Romney is no Conan; but if you're looking for a president, isn't a "pragmatic problem-solver" better than incoherent rage?thanks to The Week - The Best of the U.S. and International Media
ALSO SEE 'Establishment' Republicanism as whipping boy of the socalled "real" conservatives
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Teilhard de Chardin wrote I am far from denying the destructive and disintegrating forces of passion. I will go so far as to agree that apart from the reproductive function, men have hitherto used love, on the whole, as an instrument of self-corruption and intoxication. But what do these excesses prove? Because fire consumes and electricity can kill are we to stop using them? The feminine is the most formidable of the forces of matter. True enough. "Very well, then," say the moralists, "we must avoid it." "Not at all," I reply, "we take hold of it." In every domain of the real (physical, affective, intellectual) "danger" is a sign of power. Only a mountain can create a terrifying drop. The customary education of the Christian conscience tends to make us confuse tutiorism (probabilism) with prudence, safety with truth. Avoiding the risk of transgression has become more important to us than carrying a difficult position for God. And it is this that is killing us. "The more dangerous a thing, the more is its conquest ordained by life": it is from that conviction that the modern world has emerged; and from that our religion, too, must be reborn. "The Evolution of Chastity" (1934), as translated by René Hague in Toward the Future (1975) |
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