lifes lessons and hard courses and choices are in this book. this book shows us how to deal with them all.

Upon hearing about this book, I immediately rushed to the book store to grab a copy. As a seven year participant of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, I know the great impact that the Ms. Foundation has had on the lives of countless young women across the nation. Each of the 52 stories describe life lessons which all young women should learn: be open to new possibilities, develop mentors, gain your independence. Truly, this book is a must-read for all.

I am an alum of Emma willard (2000) and I think this book is important for anyone (esp. with a daughter or sister) to read. Ms. Hamner was the associate head of school while I was there and is an incredibly intelligent, not to mention friendly, woman. Her work on this subject helped make Emma Willard a great place to be a growing adolescent/woman and I think this book is valuable to anyone interested in gender studies and such.

In Woman.: A Celebration To Benefit The Ms. Foundation For Woman, Carol Gilligan, Byllye Avery, Wilma Mankiller, and Letty Cottis Pogrebin provide illuminating and thought-provoking essays on the experience of being female in a spectrum of countries and cultures around the world. Profusely illustrated with 200 color and b/w photographs, Woman. is both a testament, a memorial, and a multicultural acknowledgment of women through a diversity of images reflecting the gender that "holds up half the sky". Woman. is an impressive and recommended addition to photography collections, women's studies lists, and would make an ideal gift for a friend, family member, school or community library.

Reading this book did not, alas, lead to the birth of pleasure. It was a painful experience. The highest value for Gilligan is the pursuit of the 'authentic self,' especially the female one, in the face of nasty 'patriarchy.' Twenty-five years ago, 'patriarchy' really meant something; it was a call to arms against those social, political, and economic structures entirely in the hands of men. But the word is at outmoded as is the sentimental and romantic stuff purveyed here. There is more to life, more to gender, more to maturity, and certainly more to human values than this pursuit of pleasure.

Carol Gilligan has transformed our thinking of how adolescents experience their growing up in the modern world. With her new beautifully written and truly brilliant book, she shows the reasons why men start to think about leaving when they truly fall in love, and why it is so hard for everyone to know truly, viscerally, deeply what they know (but what might be painful for self or others to acknowledge fully). Ranging from empirical data, ancient myths, literature, her own life experiences growing up (movingly told with unflinching honesty), and her observations as a therapist, Gilligan eloquently sketches the reasons why the Western tradition has embraced the genre of tragedy to tell stories of love.
This is a complex, challenging, and courageous book. It stands on par with the most daring work of such thinkers as Freud or Darwin, using the author's unusual intelligence to discern unacknowledged truths behind everyday realities.
I could not put it down, and it resonates deeply in the most unexpected contexts. Buy this book; it is not only the birth of pleasure but also a pleasure to think with Gilligan.

Its difficult to summarize this amazing book--I just loved it. Everyone who has read this book has been so touched by it. I was not able to put it down. In this amazing book, Carol Gilligan tells the story of a young woman named Psyche who breaks taboos on seeing and speaking about love. In doing this, she frees herself and Eros or Cupid, her lover, from a tragic love story. The revolutionary implications of Gilligan's work have never been clearer and this book is bound to be attacked.
This is one of those rare books that will change the way you see the world.
Her telling of the Psyche and Cupid myth is brilliant and original. Once again,Gilligan is right on the edge, where artists always are. Everyone will be able to relate to many parts of this book. This is a must read book.

Gilligan's ground-breaking project which gave rise to the notion of the multiplicity of moral voices provides the groundwork for Hekman's attempts to defend what she terms Foucault's and Lyotard's "political post-modernism" against Derrida's "apolitical post-modernism". Hekman's efforts are very promising for those working in fields that grope in the dark seeking a way out of the abyss of post-modernist nihilism. She argues that the only hope for amplifying the voices of the marginalised, be they women, minorities, etc. is through adopting Foucault's notion of discourse to dispense with the universalisms of the enlightenment in order to pave the way for more localised moral voices. Once the local is recognised, no one group can claim that its morality or ethical values are superior and ought to be universalised. Hekman's efforts are to be commended, however, the lack of reference to a methodology through-which her ambitious project could be realised, was the books main and probably only flaw.

I was given every Freud text printed by WW Norton in college to read throughout my studies. Sitting in class I was alternately amazed by Freud's insights and thoroughly irritated by the defects of his analysis of female development. His theories seemed inconsistent, even containing contradictions, especially regarding the growth of girls into womanhood. It was extremely difficult to refute parts of his theory without denying the truth of how he spoke to boy's development, since his system of theory is all-encompassing and hermetic, and "It's rational precisely because its based on irrational subconscious thought" etc etc etc.

Suprisingly, Carol Gilligan, adds to the main body of psychological theory, counterposing slightly but mainly filling in grey areas, rather than directly opposing it. I was suprised by this because I had avoided Gilligan due to Hoff Sommers criticism, among others, which had led me to believe Gilligan's work was more ideological than scientific. Gilligan has suprising insights into the the critical age of adolesence for girls, and the postulation of a parallel understanding of morality is still as relevant now as it was when first written.
The form of morality she outlines fleshes out women's development as a fully realized system that understands the human condition full of falliabilities, rather than shrill repressive/mothering feminism I feared. As a bonus to readers wary of ranting, Gilligan is fairly focused on female development as opposed to social critique. Be aware, though, that her style does emulate Freud in that the writing is focused on specific examples to show broad conclusions, as opposed to vast statistical analysis.

Highly recommended.

Dr. Gilligan presents an authoratative look at the psychological development of women, giving particular attention to the moral development course that women take. The work stems from her work as a research assistant to Lawrence Kohlberg in his seminal study of stages of moral development.

Dr. Gilligan demonstrates that men and women grow up speaking in "different" voices. The book presents Dr. Gilligan's work with women and compares that developmental course with that of the males that she and Kohlberg studied in Iowa.

The conclusion that males grow up and take on a psychology that is legalistic and logic centered, while women grow up relationship oriented has formed the basis for much of the works such as Gray's Mars vs Venus series.

Carol Gilligan's work has the great virtue of asking the basic question - is Revealed Wisdom about ethical decision making bias free? She demonstrates that it is not. Interestingly, Stephen Covey agrees with her, something which has been overlooked by other reviewers of this book. Her final summation is that placing relationships to the larger human community over deontological abstractions about justice constitutes a higher level of ethical decision making. The book has garnered much attention as a female challenge to male constructions of ethical decision making. This is simplistic. Gilligan does indeed point out that, as Kihlberg postulated, women may be more likely than men to make ethical decisions based on responsibilites to others rather than on abstractions. She questions the validity of Kohlberg's conclusion that this is a lower level of ethical reasoning, and she questions this not on the basis of gender but on the basis of logic and ethics. (Kohlberg, by the way, never explains why he believes that justice as abstraction represents a higher level of ethical decision making than justice in context of community.) There are many cultures which hold that the highest level of ethical decision making incorporates responsibility to others. Unfortunately, neither Kohlberg nor Gilligan is an anthropologist -- nor are they ethicists. They are both psychologists and thus limited in their framework. This is not a gender issue; this is a survival issue for the human race! Stephen Covey, in his various 7 Habits of Highly Effective People comes to much the same conclusion, without discussing gender.

This is essentially Nietzsche in drag. A series of interviews with adolescent girls reveals that women have been victims of "psychological foot-binding" as they are required to silence their own voices to earn relationships with others. Interestingly, in every case, the young girl is portrayed as a victim of oppression, and everyone is to blame: teachers, parents, brothers. All of them prohibit a girls' free self-expression. None of the girls is ever to blame--they are never overly-assertive, cranky, or difficult. They are always the innocent bearers of feelings that are squelched in a patriarchal society.
This is simply feminist propoganda in the guise of sociology.

The early chapters of this book, are very hard going, as the authors justify and re-justify their research methodology. However, when you get clear of this, the conversations with girls as they grow older, at different points in their lives, are fascinating. I found myself thinking through episodes in my own life and the life of my 13year old girl, to see how she has changed, and how my interventions or questions or just being there have helped (and hopefully not hindered too severely) her grow strong and confident. In the end, a powerful story of girls growing into womenhood, and the challenges they face.

For once researchers have actually spent time with girls and listened to them closely. As someone who has worked in schools for years, I found their conclusions believable and important. The pressure on girls to be nice, change their opinion to please people around them, and suppress some of their natural energy can be seen any day in almost any middle school in this country. Gilligan puts it, not in terms of complaining, but rather in terms of making changes that will release girls from some problematic conventions and let them fully participate in life.