Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

In the now-classic 1982 book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan reanalyzed interview data on moral development in middle class boys and girls. While using the model psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg created, the boys scored higher in moral development than the girls did. Gilligan analyzed the actual text of the initial researchers’ questions and the student’s responses and found that the girls’ responses clearly indicated a different kind of thinking from that of the boys. Interpreted from a male model, the girls’ responses led interviewers to believe they could hardly grasp the question. While the boys made the moral exercise a kind of “math problem with humans,” the girls persisted in trying to meet the needs of all people involved in the story, rather than choosing decisively between one relationship and another. Gilligan demonstrated that, read differently, the girls’ responses indicated a much higher stage in Kohlberg’s theory than the boys’ stage, and suggested girls often develop superior emotional and relational intelligence, or ability to form and tend to relationships with others.