The War Against Boys (18 page)

In October 1998, Hugh Liebert, a sophomore at Harvard who had been my intern the previous summer, spoke to Bertsch. She told him that the data would not be available until the end of the academic year, adding, “They have been kept secret because the issues [raised in the study] are so sensitive.” She suggested that he check back occasionally. He tried again in March. This time she informed him, “They will not be available anytime soon.” Several months later he sent an email message directly to Gilligan, and received this reply from Bertsch:

None of the
In a Different Voice
studies have been published. We are in the process of donating the college student study to the Murray Research Center at Radcliffe, but that will not be completed for another year, probably. At this point Professor Gilligan has no immediate plans of donating the abortion or the rights and responsibilities studies. Sorry that none of what you are interested in is available.

Brendan Maher is a professor emeritus at Harvard University and a former chairman of the psychology department. I told him about the inaccessibility of Gilligan's data and the explanation that their sensitive nature precluded public dissemination. He laughed and said, “It would be extraordinary to say [that one's data] are too sensitive for others to see.” He pointed out that there are standard methods for handling confidential materials in research. Names are left out but raw scores are reported, “so others can see if they can replicate your study.” You also must disclose such details as how you chose your subjects, how the interviews were recorded, and the method by which you derived meaning from them (your coding system). There is a real risk of bias and prejudice in coding, so it is critical to have two or three people code the same interview to see if you have “interrater reliability.” Even with all these controls, there is no guarantee your research is significant or accurate. But, said, Maher, “without them, what do you have?”

What you have are unpublished, unexamined, uncriticized data that are nevertheless deemed to be of such historical importance to merit being donated to a prestigious Harvard research center for posterity. No doubt Gilligan will insist on continued confidentiality.
⁶⁰

Over the years, scholars have criticized Gilligan for her cavalier way with research data. In 1986, then Tufts University professor Zella Luria commented on the elusive character of Gilligan's “studies”: “One is left with the knowledge that there were some studies involving women and sometimes men and that women were somehow sampled and somehow interviewed on some issues. . . . Somehow the data were sifted and somehow yielded a clear impression that women could be powerfully characterized as caring and interrelated. This is an exceedingly intriguing proposal, but it is not yet substantiated as a research conclusion.”
⁶¹

In 1991, Faye Crosby, a Smith College psychologist (now at the University of California, Santa Cruz), rebuked Gilligan for creating this “illusion of data”: “Gilligan referred throughout her book to the information obtained in her studies, but did not present any tabulations. Indeed, she never quantified anything. The reader never learns anything about 136 of the 144 people from the third study, as only 8 are quoted in the book. One probably does not have to be a trained researcher to worry about this tactic.”
⁶²

These are serious complaints of a type that, in disciplines that respect scholarly standards, have been known to lead to censure or worse. Why has so little notice been taken of the scarcity of Gilligan's evidence? I see at least two explanations. First of all, in the Harvard School of Education, where Gilligan held her professorship, the standards for acceptable research are very different from those in other Harvard departments. Second, Gilligan writes on “gender theory,” which immediately confers ideological sensitivity on her findings. The political climate makes it very awkward for anyone (especially a man) to criticize her. Apart from the small group of feminist critics who bristled at her suggestion that men and women are different, few academics have dared to suggest that the empress had no clothes.

Gilligan's defenders will argue that to criticize her for her shortcomings as an empirical psychologist is to miss the point. The true power of
In a Different
Voice,
they say, has little to do with proving this or that claim about male and female behavior. It is groundbreaking research because it advanced the idea that past psychological research was largely a male-centered discipline based on the experiences of only half the human race. Gilligan revolutionized modern psychology by introducing women's voices into a social science tradition that had systematically ignored them.

There is merit to this argument. Gilligan was not the first to urge that women be studied directly, rather than by way of male models, but she was more effective than anyone at getting that message through to both scholars and the wider public. For this she deserves credit. Moreover, at a time (in the early 1980s) when women's scholarship was blinkered by the dogma that men and women were cognitively interchangeable, Gilligan's “difference feminism” was refreshing. But her specific and much-celebrated claim about women's distinctive moral voice turns out to be nothing more than a seductive hypothesis, without evidential basis.

With the success of
In a Different Voice
and with the considerable resources available to her at Harvard, Gilligan might have gone on to answer her scholarly critics. She might have refined her thesis about male and female differences in moral reasoning and done the genuine research scholars expected of her. She might have tried to put her purported discoveries on a scientific footing. But that is not what she did. In the years following publication of
In
a Different Voice
, Gilligan's methods remained anecdotal and impressionistic, with increasingly heavy doses of psychoanalytic theorizing and gender ideology.
⁶³
Her research on adolescent girls in
Making Connections
is a case in point. The gloomy picture of adolescent girls that she presented to Ms., the AAUW, and a concerned public is every bit as distorted as any ever presented by social scientists using (in Gilligan's words) “androcentric and patriarchal norms.”
⁶⁴

Gilligan is unruffled by scholarly criticism and shows few signs of changing her research methods. She boldly insists that to give in to the demand for conventional evidence would be to give in to the standards of the “dominant culture” she is criticizing. She justifies her lack of scientific proof for her large claims quoting the late poet Audre Lorde: “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”
⁶⁵

Lorde's remark is often used to fend off “masculinist” criticism of unscientific feminist methods. One might well ask, especially if one's research is part of a larger antipatriarchal project aimed at “dismantling the master's house,” what better way to accomplish that end than by using the master's own tools? More to the point, Gilligan's justification for deserting sound scientific method in establishing her claims is deeply anti-intellectual. She seems to be saying, I don't
have
to play by the rules; the men wrote them. That rejection of conventional scientific standards simply will not do: if Gilligan feels justified in abandoning the methods of social science, she has to critique them. She should tell us what's wrong with them and show us a better set of tools.

The
New York Times Magazine
profile that played so large a role in popularizing Gilligan's views described her as having a “Darwinian sense of mission to excavate the hidden chambers of a common buried past.”
⁶⁶
Gilligan herself is not averse to the comparison with Darwin. When
Education Week
asked me what I thought of Gilligan's work and claims, I said, “I'm not sure what she does has much status as social science.”
Education Week
reported Gilligan's response to my remarks: “[I]f quantitative studies are the only kind that qualify as ‘research,' then Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, would not be considered a researcher.”
⁶⁷

Gilligan actually sees herself as pursuing a Darwinian method of inquiry. She informs us that when she read Darwin's
Voyage of the
Beagle, she wondered if she “could find some place like the Galapagos Islands” to do her research in developmental psychology.
⁶⁸
And she did: “I went to my own version of the Galapagos Islands with a group of colleagues. . . . We travelled to girls in search of the origins of women's development.”

Even a casual look at Gilligan's contributions suggests that she should not be comparing herself to Darwin. Darwin openly presented masses of data and invited criticism. His main thesis has been confirmed by countless observations of the fossil record. By contrast, no one has been able to
replicate even the three secret studies that were the basis for Gilligan's central claims in her most influential work,
In a Different Voice
. In 2012, the
Boston Globe
reviewed the history of Gilligan's “feminist classic.” Its verdict: “Today,
In a Different Voice
has been the subject of so many rebuttals that it is no longer taken seriously as an academic work.”
⁶⁹

Gilligan's writings on silenced girls, the limits of “androcentric and patriarchal norms,” and the hazards of Western culture are not science or scholarship. They are, at best, eccentric social criticism. Yet by borrowing the prestige of academic science, her theories persuaded parents, educators, political officials, and women's activists that girls are being diminished and led them to policies that have indeed diminished boys.

But that is only half the problem. In 1995, Gilligan and her colleagues at the Harvard School of Education inaugurated the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology, Boys' Development and the Culture of Manhood. Within a year, she announced the discovery of a crisis among boys even worse than the one afflicting girls. “Girls' psychological development in patriarchy involves a process of eclipse that is even more total for boys.”
⁷⁰
She and her colleagues would soon focus on liberating boys from the mask of masculinity. The war against boys was about to intensify.

I
n 1996, Carol Gilligan announced the need for a revolution in how we raise boys. The stakes are high, she said. She called for a new pedagogy to free boys from an errant masculinity that is endangering civilization: “After a century of unparalleled violence, at a time when violence has become appalling . . . [w]e understand better the critical importance of emotional intimacy and vulnerability.”
¹
Gilligan asked us to reflect on these vital questions: “What if the equation of civilization with patriarchy were broken? What if boys did not psychologically disconnect from women and dissociate themselves from vital parts of relationships?”
²

But those who followed Gilligan's earlier claims and campaigns might pose different questions: What if her studies of boys are a travesty of scientific inquiry? What if the programs and policies she recommends do more harm than good? What can be done to protect boys from the trusting educators who faithfully accept Gilligan's theories?

Gilligan claimed to have discovered “a startling asymmetry”—girls undergo social trauma as they enter adolescence. For boys, she says, the period of
crisis is early childhood. Boys aged three to seven are pressured to “take into themselves the structure or moral order of a patriarchal civilization: to internalize a patriarchal voice.”
³
This masculinizing process, says Gilligan, is psychologically damaging and dehumanizing.

Gilligan's views on masculine identity built on earlier psychological theories of female and male development, in particular the theories of feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow, which Gilligan made use of in her 1982 book,
In a Different Voice.
⁴
In Chodorow's 1978
The Reproduction of Mothering
, she argued that traditional masculine and feminine roles are rooted not so much in biology as in a self-perpetuating sex/gender system that is universal to human societies: “Hitherto . . . all sex/gender systems have been male-dominated.”
⁵
The sex/gender system, says Chodorow, is the way society has organized sexuality and reproduction to perpetuate the subordination of women. The system keeps women down by permanently assigning to them the primary care of infants and children, while men dominate the public sphere.

Because mothers do most of the nurturing, all children start out life more strongly identified with their mothers than their fathers. That identification and attachment, says Chodorow, have profoundly different consequences for boys and girls. A girl grows up with a “sense of continuity and similarity to the mother.” Boys, on the other hand, learn that to be masculine is to be unlike their caregiver: “Women, as mothers, produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother. . . . By contrast, women as mothers produce sons whose nurturant capacities and needs have been systematically curtailed and repressed.”
⁶

According to Chodorow, both women and men perpetuate male supremacy by the way they socialize boys: “Women's mothering in the isolated nuclear family of contemporary capitalist society” shows boys that nurturing is women's work.
⁷
This “prepares men for participation in a male-dominant family, and society, for their lesser emotional participation in family life, and for their participation in the capitalist world of work.”
⁸
In this way, the social organization of parental roles supports a capitalist/patriarchal system that Chodorow finds exploitative and unfair—especially to women: “It is politically and socially important to confront this organization of parenting. . . . It can be changed.”
⁹