Carol Gilligan visits GVSU

Carol Gilligan, one of Time magazine's 25 most influential Americans, will be a featured guest at Grand Valley State University on Thursday, February 20. The public is invited, free of charge, to hear the psychologist offer her up-to-date views on women and gender.

Gilligan's lecture, 'In a Different Voice: 20 Years Later,' begins at 7:30 p.m. on February 20 at the Louis Armstrong Theatre on Grand Valley's Allendale Campus. The event is sponsored by the GVSU Women's Center and several other university offices, and the Nokomis Foundation. The lecture kicks off a month-long slate of events celebrating the grand opening of the GVSU Women's Center, established in 2001 and now permanently located in the Kirkhof Center.

In 1982 Gilligan published In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, which analyzed the psychological development of women and men and concluded that the two genders grow up speaking in 'different' voices. She came to be known as the founder of 'difference feminism,' asserting that women have differing moral and psychological tendencies than men. According to Gilligan, men think in terms of rules and justice and women are more inclined to think in terms of caring and relationships. She asked that Western society begin to value both equally.

Gilligan's new book, The Birth of Pleasure (Knopf, 2002), is also called 'revolutionary' ¿ about love. Her research with couples in crisis, adolescent girls, and young boys and their parents forms the basis for the book, which National Public Radio described as the work of 'a psychologist who writes like a novelist.'

Gilligan is now a professor at New York University as well as chair of the Advisory Committee for the Center for Gender and Education at Harvard.