Transcription
I'm going to stand up. Yes, because I can. Can see you, but thank you. Can you hear me in the back? Yes. Good. Okay, thank you, Francesca Guccifer, for that beautiful introduction. I don't need to hold this, but, um, thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here today. And thank you, Victoria Hemps, and the Griffils Foundation for making it possible for me to come and speak here today about my work. And I speak today about my latest thinking about the ethic of care and also feminism.
So, um, it's over 30 years now since I first wrote about the ethic of care as "a different voice," meaning simply a different way of speaking about the self and about morality. I had been teaching theories of identity and moral development and also listening to people who were facing actual situations of moral conflict and choice. In other words, the voices not only of theory, but the voices of people on the ground. My ear was caught by two things: a silence among men and an absence of resonance when women said what we really felt and thought. By inquiring into men's silences and providing some resonance for women, I heard a voice that had been held in silence. It was like shifting the frequency and suddenly hearing a station that had been jammed. I wrote "in a different voice" to make sense of a dissonance between women's voices and the voices of then-prevailing psychological and moral theories. In the process, I discovered the extent to which we, meaning both men and women, had been telling false stories about ourselves. The dissonance, excuse me, the dissonance in the voice arose from an assumption of connectedness that changed the parameters of how moral conflicts are perceived and understood. But it also broke a silence. Would it make a difference to bring the voices of women, and I mean plural, the voices of women, into conversations that had been framed and conducted largely by men? In many respects, this question is still with us, and it's focused by thinking about the ethics of care. If anything, the ethic of care is more pressing now than when I wrote about it.
Now, uh, and the cost of isolation. We know that autonomy is an illusion. That people's lives are interconnected. In 1963, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. observed, "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly affects all indirectly." Since that time, we've come to a clearer understanding of trauma, its effects on our neurology and also our psychology. Dissociation, meaning the splitting of consciousness, our ability to hold aspects of our experience outside of our awareness so that we can know and also not know what we know, is the psychological hallmark of trauma. It leads to a loss of voice and of memory, and thus to a loss of our ability to tell our stories accurately.
In the years since I wrote "in a different voice," I have been engaged in studies of children's development, starting with a 10-year project on girls' development, which then led to a new look at the experience of young boys and also to work with men, women, couples in crisis. In other words, what are the impediments, the impasses in relationships between women and men? The questions raised by this research were psychological questions: How do we come not to know what within ourselves we know? How do we break a cycle of tragedy and trauma?
When I wrote my 2002 book, "The Birth of Pleasure," I connected research conducted in contemporary settings with ancient myths and the insights of artists across time and culture. My questions were about the psychology of love: Why are we drawn to tragic love stories? Why do we repeat these stories? New research in psychology, including new studies of babies, show that we start from a place of connectedness. We are born with a voice and a desire to live in relationships. The capacity to love and to care are part of our humanity. The question then is, how can these capacities be encouraged and developed? How can they be educated? And also, how do they become injured or stunted? As I discovered and wrote about in "The Birth of Pleasure," we have a map of love that is also a map of resistance, illuminating a path that leads away from trauma and tragedy. In other words, that breaks a cycle of trauma and tragedy.
As my research came to focus increasingly on questions about voice and resistance, the intersections of psychology, our psychology, our inner lives, and cultures came to the fore. The word "resistance" has several meanings. Like a healthy body, a healthy psyche resists infection. My research on development illuminated a process of initiation that was marked by signs of psychological distress, times in children's lives when psychological resiliency, that is the ability to withstand stress, comes into conflict with cultural adaptation. Resistance also has political meaning. It means speaking truth to power, resisting lies and false authority. And it has a psychoanalytic meaning, namely a reluctance to know what one knows. My work took all of these meanings of resistance.
In my lecture today, I will return to some of the questions about gender that were raised by "in a different voice," and I will look at them in light of the recognition that gender is at the center of the tension between a patriarchal order, meaning an order that is based upon gender where the voice of authority is the voice of a father or fathers, and a democratic order of living which rests on a premise of equal voice or equality. In other words, the order of living that is organized around gender is patriarchy. Democracy, I think, is the opposite of patriarchy. In a democratic society, gender is irrelevant. The ethic of care, in its connection with voice, with everyone having a voice that is listened to, that is listened to in its own right and on its own terms, and heard with respect, I could say responded to with integrity and respect, uh, is the ethic of care. In its concern with voice and with relationships, is the ethic of love and of democratic citizenship. It's an ethic that resists the injustices of hierarchy and domination.
The tensions between democracy and patriarchy are playing out in the culture wars of our time, and they also play out within our psyche. In his first address to Congress after being elected president, Barack Obama spoke about carelessness, its effects on health, on education, on the economy, on the planet. He underscored the need to replace an ethos of individual gain with an ethic of care and collective responsibility. During his campaign, he gave a stirring speech calling on the American people to understand and then transcend long-standing and embittered conversations about race. But this call for a new conversation about race was not met with a similar call for a new conversation about gender. Why? In many ways, our conversations about gender have been stuck on the question of whether or not women are different from men, and if different, who is better and who is worse. Does the liberation of women free women now to live in the way that men have lived, that is to assume a position of dominance rather than a position of subordination? Or does this imply a societal transformation that is in a change in the way we organize our lives? Again, the ethic of care is at the center of this conversation.
In returning now to think again about the ethic of care, its relationship to resisting injustice, and to a transformational feminism, I want to consider three questions with you today. First, given the value of caring and the costs of carelessness, why is the ethic of care still marginalized and embattled? Secondly, within the academic world, what is the justice versus care debate really about? Thirdly, and what is the relation of all this to women and to people's lives more generally? Are women's voices still key in bringing these issues to our attention? I think looking at this audience, I would say yes. Here we are. We have what few men here, but let me begin. So you see, for you, well, we'll talk. You'll see where I'm going with this.
To begin, let me begin for a minute with the voices of children. As children give voice to the obvious and the reminder that once we were all children. So what children know is what we all once knew. In the tale of "The Emperor's New Clothes," do you know this story? It's a young boy who says that the emperor is naked. In Hawthorne's novel, "The Scarlet Letter," seven-year-old Pearl sees what the good wives and the Puritans cannot discern: the connection between her mother and the minister. In my research, it was an 11-year-old girl who responded to my saying, "This interview is just between you and me," by adding, "And your tape recorder." When I went on to explain that the tape would be listened to only by other members of the research team, she said, "Then why don't they all just come into the room?" Disruptive questions. I needed her to take what I said at face value so I could get on with my work. And in fact, she agreed to my terms, choosing a name she wanted us to use in place of her own. But from then on, she sounded depressed. The price of staying in relationship with me, the price of staying in relationship with me, was not to say what she saw and to act as if what I said made sense. I couldn't go on working in this way. What stopped me was the realization that I was becoming complicit in overcoming children's resistance to saying what they saw and knowing what they knew.
At Halloween, do you know what Halloween is? Okay. At Halloween, in a fifth-grade classroom, I watched the 10-year-old girls stare out the window and look up at the ceiling as their teacher read story after story in which a woman was strangled or otherwise mangled. They loved their teacher, who was a woman. They knew she didn't want them to notice this. The resistance that gripped my attention was a resistance to dissociation, that is to splitting parts of your experience outside your awareness so you can know and then also not know what you're thinking and feeling. Okay. In coming of age, girls were aware of but also resisting pressures to disengage themselves from their honest voices. Exploring this resistance, I saw how it challenged an initiation that was culturally sanctioned and socially enforced. In many ways, it was adaptive, if not essential, to praise the emperor's new clothes and not see that the minister who professed to love the truth was, in his own words, "living a lie."
As the minister says in Hawthorne's novel, I had not remembered that the word "patriarchy" appears repeatedly in Hawthorne's novel, "The Scarlet Letter," which is read by almost every American high school child. I had read the novel as most of us read it, as a tragic love story and a cautionary tale about the wages of sin. But there it was, right on the page: patriarchal privilege, patriarchal power, patriarchal deacon, along with a confession, "I used to watch and study this patriarchal personage, the father of the custom-house, with, I think, livelier curiosity than any other form of humanity there presented to my notice. He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon." This is Hawthorne. "He was, in truth, a rare phenomenon, so perfect in one point of view, so shallow, so delusive, so impalpable, such an absolute non-entity in every other end." I had associated patriarchy with anthropology and the study of ancient tribes, and also with a feminism that saw men as monsters. Yet, yet in writing a play inspired by "The Scarlet Letter" and turning the script into the libretto for an opera called "Pearl," my eldest son, Jonathan, and I were struck by the depths of Hawthorne's insights into what is not usually thought of as the American dilemma, namely the tension between the radical Protestant vision of an unmediated relationship with God, who can be worshipped by anyone, anywhere, at home or in the forest, as well as in church, and the continuation of an all-male clerical hierarchy. The tension between the vision of a democratic society, the shining city on the hill, and the continuation of patriarchal power and privilege. In an aria for the opera, we ask, "If God is love, how can love be sin?"
Working in the theater, I experienced how voice, how our voices live in our bodies, how they're connected to breath and to the physical world of sound and vibration, as well as to language and culture. So writing about voice, I write about a psychology that is always located in the body, in the physical world, in society, in the cultural world. But also the psyche means that we have a voice, and with it, a capacity for resistance. And if you do not hear a person's voice, you have to ask, where is it? Where is that voice? Where is the child who says the emperor's naked? Where is the girl who says, "I see what nobody seems to be able to see"? That voice is inside us.
I discovered how dissociation can be enacted through the body, how a voice can be separated from breath and sound and held in silence so that, as 16-year-old Tanya says, "The voice that stands up for what I believe in has been buried deep inside me." That is buried, not lost, held in silence, experienced perhaps as a subtle vibration, a kind of visceral knowing. The voice of integrity is not lost, but also it's not being heard yet. I also heard girls resist silencing a voice of integrity and witnessed some of the conflicts that followed when girls said what it was that they were seeing and sensing, knew what they knew. Conflicts within themselves, sometimes, but also conflicts in the adults around them. The voices of girls and also young boys often call forward voices that adults have silenced. Men and women have silenced within ourselves. You know, I, I started to listen. And when I did work with couples, I would listen in women for, "Where is the voice, the honest voice of the 11-year-old girl?" And in men, I would listen for, "Where is the emotionally intelligent voice of the four or five-year-old boy?" Because it's there somewhere.
The voices of girls and young boys often call forward voices that adults have silenced within ourselves. Always for good reasons, but at a cost. Were these losses necessary? Are they inevitable? Are they a price of growing up, as we're told, in living in civilization? Or in these silences, sustaining psychological injuries and public injustices that need to be voiced and scrutinized and addressed through action? So, just so you know what I'm talking about. "Mummy, five-year-old Jake says one morning to his mother, 'You have a happy voice, but I also hear a little worried voice.'" Mama, five-year-old Will says, "Why do you smile when you're sad?" When four-year-old Sam asks his mother one day, "Mommy, why are you sad?" and she, wanting to shield him from her sadness, says, "I'm not sad." You know that? He says, "Mommy, I know you. I was inside you." When Alex expresses his remorse over having lost it and hit his five-year-old son, Nick, the previous day, Nick says to his father, "You are afraid that if you hit me, when I grow up, I'll hit my children." That's a five-year-old boy. Alex, his father, had been hit by his father and had vowed to break the cycle. Nick, his five-year-old son, voices his father's fear that now the pattern will continue into the next generation.
So, in other words, children are reading the emotional, the human emotional world, including emotions that are being withheld by adults. Women's sadness, women's anger, men's fear, men's vulnerability. As children, as humans, we have the ability to read the human world around us, including emotions that are being withheld. We are far more psychologically canny and astute than we often acknowledge or even recognize. American culture, I don't know about Spanish culture. American culture is obsessed with boundaries. That is, philosophers endlessly debate the problem of other minds, how can you understand other minds, and so forth. As children, we read other minds. We are actually responsive, relational beings. As human beings. And yet, two-month-old babies can tell the difference between the experience of relationship, someone who is in sync with them, and the appearance of relationship, someone who seems to be relating to them, but in fact is out of touch with the baby. This is why many adults are afraid to pick up babies, because babies will know who in fact is in touch with them and who isn't.
Psychological knowledge is not generally included in discussions of ethics, and yet it is crucial to acting carefully and responsibly in the human world. Our ability to discern the relational climate around us, to pick up and register people's feelings, to follow people's thoughts, including our own, and to follow the associative stream of thought, would seem integral to considering the key ethical questions: How to live and what to do? It's another way of asking, can we know what we know? With the paradigm shift now happening in the human sciences, what used to be called women's intuition, feminine intuition, is now recognized as emotional intelligence. And when it gets a proper name like emotional intelligence, everyone forgets that it used to be talked about as women's intuition and dismissed and disparaged. So it's interesting, as traits that were seen as human traits now become valued, they lose their association with women. Which, in one way, is very important because they're recognized as human qualities. But it also is a way of forgetting the importance of women's voices and the contribution that has come from attention to women's experience.
So I want to stress that the separation of thought from emotion, which is built into most academic disciplines, of mind from body, of the self from relationships, once seen as markers of development, have now become identified as manifestations of injury or trauma. I come back to the questions then: Why is the ethic of care embattled? What is the academic debate over justice versus care about? And what is the association with women and more generally with people's lives? And I cannot go further without talking about gender. A word associated, once I thought, with Latin vocabulary. A word that is integral to the culture of patriarchy. It was the implicit gendering of psychological and moral theory that caught my attention as a problem that needed to be addressed. Researchers who were studying men and generalizing to humans, and also elevating masculine qualities, reason, mind, and self over those considered soft or subjective or, quote, "feminine," that is emotions, body, and relationships. This was a gendered psychology that was not being identified as such. Psychologically, it didn't make sense. Without a self or a voice, there is no relationship, only the chimera of relationship. Without relationship or resonance, voice recedes into silence or takes on the sound of someone speaking in an echo chamber.
The gender binary, where being a man means not being a woman or not like being like a woman, and the gender hierarchy, where being a man means being on top, are the DNA of patriarchy, the building blocks of a patriarchal order. The word "patriarchy" means hierarchy or rule of priests, in which the hieros, the priest, is the potter, or father. The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy, which is also based on gender, but democracy, which rests on a premise of equality. In a patriarchal family or religion or culture, power and authority descend from a father or fathers, and human qualities designated masculine are privileged over those gendered feminine. But by elevating some men over other men, and all men over women, patriarchy is an order of domination. But in dividing fathers from mothers and daughters and sons, and bifurcating human qualities into masculine or feminine, patriarchy creates rifts in the psyche, dividing everyone from parts of ourselves. This fragmentation of the psyche links patriarchy with trauma. The initiation of children into the gender codes and scripts of patriarchy, thus, is marked by signs of psychological distress and resistance to this initiation, as now a number of research studies have shown, is linked with psychological resilience and strength. But when these psychic splits are culturally sanctioned and socially rewarded, when the separation of thought from emotion is considered objective and rational and is educationally prized, children experience a crisis of connection. How can they stay in touch with themselves and also make their way in the world if being loved and accepted, included and promoted, hinges on silencing an honest voice? Then a paradoxical situation arises in the sense that one is forced to choose between having a voice, being able to express one's thoughts and feelings, and having "relationships." Because, but if one doesn't have a voice, then who is in relationship? In other words, the word "relationships" have no meaning. The paradox is to give up relationship in order to have "relationships."
Patriarchy, with this gender binary and hierarchy, is implicated in these paradoxical situations. And it is the psychological cost, as well as the political injustices associated with the division of people into superior and inferior, dominant and subordinate, that make it necessary for us to face the contradictions between the gendered order of patriarchy and democratic relationships and values. In our book, "The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future," my NYU colleague David Richards and I observed that, "What patriarchy precludes is love among equals, and thus it precludes democracy founded on such love and the freedom of voice that it encourages." Because it is a gendered order, patriarchy affects men and women differently. For women, it leads to self-silencing, often in the name of goodness. In the gendered universe of patriarchy, care is a feminine ethic, not a universal one. Caring is what good women do, and the people who care are doing women's work. They are devoted to others, attentive to their needs, responsive to their voices. They are selfless, meaning as though without a voice of their own.
I entered the conversation about women and morality in the late 1960s, a time in the U.S. that witnessed the convergence of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the movement to stop atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, the movement to end poverty, the women's movement, and the gay liberation movement. I was teaching at Harvard with Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst working in the Freudian tradition, and Lawrence Kohlberg, a cognitive developmental psychologist working in the tradition of Piaget. To all of these men, Freud and Erikson, Piaget and Kohlberg, women appeared deficient in moral development. Women were described as having less sense of justice than men and lacking autonomy or a clear sense of self. Thus, the paradox I noticed in "in a different voice": the very qualities that distinguished what was seen as women's moral goodness, women's caring for others, women's empathy and and emotional sensitivity, marked women as deficient in moral development.
In the 1970s, with the rise of the women's movement, women questioned these assumptions. Some turned their backs on a caring that was at once idealized and devalued. Others, including myself, set out to challenge the framework. I remember interviewing a woman, woman at this time and asking her to respond to one of the hypothetical moral dilemmas that psychologists use, one of Kohlberg's dilemmas, to assess moral development. And this woman looked at me and she said, "Do you want to know what I think, or do you want to know what I really think?" indicating that she had learned to think about morality in a way that differed from how she really thought. I want to note, in passing, the challenge her question poses for the methods of psychological research. If we record what people think without asking what they really think, we are creating a picture of the human world that is odds, that is at odds with what in fact people know about themselves.
The fact of dissociation adds a further complication. We can hold parts of our experience outside of our awareness so that we know and don't know what we know. As the popular song goes, "You don't know what you don't know." The discovery made in the early days of psychoanalysis that association holds the power to undo dissociation implies that if we want to know what people know, we need to bring associative methods into our work. In other words, we have to bring relationships and attend to the stream of people's consciousness. The logic of the psyche is an associative logic, the logic of dreams, poetry, and memory, as well as the formal logic of classification and control. As humans, we are sensitive to the relational climate. And when objectivity in science is confused with non-responsive relationships, someone who says "doesn't respond," people are discouraged from saying or even knowing what they know.
Despite all the changes that have occurred in women's lives since the time I began doing my research, I still hear the power of the opposition between selfishness and selflessness in shaping women's moral judgments and guiding the choices that women make. I hear women bouncing between the two poles of this opposition, embracing selfishness, often with defiance, and then embracing selflessness in the hope of being rewarded for goodness. Interviewing women who are pregnant and considering abortion in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, I heard women describe whatever they wanted to do. I would hear a woman name whatever she wanted to do, whether it was to have the baby or to have the abortion, as selfish, while describing doing what someone else wanted her to do or thought she should do as good. I remember, I recall Nina telling me that she was planning to have an abortion because her boyfriend wanted to finish law school, and he relied on her for financial support. When I asked Nina what she wanted to do, she looked at me in astonishment. "What's wrong with doing something for someone you love?" she said. "Nothing," I said, and repeated my question. After several iterations of this conversation, with the word "selfish" ringing in my ears, I began asking women, "If it's good to be responsive to people and empathic with their concerns, you're a person. Why is it selfish to respond to yourself?" And woman after woman said, "Good question."
In my research, I found it necessary to interrupt a culture of feminine goodness that equated feminine goodness with selflessness in order to hear the voices that it was driving into silence. That is, the voices of, "Do you want to know what I really think?" as opposed to "What I think." I found myself questioning the extent to which objectivity had meant blinding oneself to the cultural context and its psychological effects. When 16-year-old Sheila says, "I don't like myself enough to look out for myself," I could easily just have scored her as a girl with low self-esteem. But instead, I asked her, "Do you really feel this way?" At which point she said, "Actually," which was always the switch word in my research with girls, "Actually," she said, "this is how I look out for myself. I never say what I'm really feeling and thinking in that way. No matter what anyone says about me, I don't have to care because they don't know who I am." And then she looked at me and she said, "Brilliant, isn't it?" And I said, "Yes, because it is a brilliant strategy, but," I said, "it's at the expense of what you said you wanted." What she had said she wanted, which was honesty in relationships. So it was a brilliant strategy of self-protection, but also costly.
Listening to women led me to make a distinction pivotal to understanding care ethics. When care is described as a feminine ethic, subsidiary to justice, a matter of special obligations or interpersonal relationships, the framework is patriarchal. Care is being interpreted in terms of a gender binary and hierarchy, where justice is masculine, care is feminine. Justice is privileged over care. Within a democratic framework, where gender is irrelevant, care is a human ethic. Equal voice is the condition for addressing conflicts in relationships through free and open conversation or debate. If you don't have equal voice, you cannot address conflicts in relationships. Care, aligned with equal voice and relationships, with core democratic values, care becomes a feminist ethic, guiding the historic struggle to free democracy from patriarchy. It is an ethic of resistance to injustice. A feminist ethic of care sounds different within a patriarchal culture because it joins emotion with reason, relationships with self, men with women. It's a voice of resistance, challenging gender binaries and hierarchies that maintain a patriarchal order.
To draw on the anthropologist Clifford Geertz's distinction between thin and thick interpretations of culture, a thin understanding of democracy homogenizes differences in the name of equality, whereas thick democracy rests on a premise that different voices, different voices are integral to the functioning of a democratic society. We need to hear the full range of human voices. That's what democracy means. To answer, then, the first question I raise: A feminist ethic of care is embattled because feminism is embattled. Or, more accurately, a transformational feminism. In many parts of the world now, women are free to live like men, or at least to live the way men lived when women were taking care of them. But the current and often heated discussions in the U.S. of work-family balance show how volatile it is now to raise questions about care and caring. If, in thin democracy, if everyone is equal and autonomous, then no one has to care. I mean, in a sense, I think women have taken this issue and put it in front of society and said, "Do we, meaning everyone, do we care about caring?" And if not, I mean, who is going to do the care work? Because it used to be women and immigrants and people of color and people who were seen as less than fully human. The argument then is about transformation, releasing care and caring from its association with subservience and subordination.
The culture wars in the U.S. have now turned in a more liberal direction with the past election, the re-election of Obama, signaling a resurgence of democracy and, at least for the moment, a defeat of patriarchy. These wars have brought to the surface the ongoing tensions in American society that Hawthorne described in his novel, between the commitment to democratic institutions and values and the continuation of patriarchal privilege and power. The struggle between a feminist and a feminine ethic of care is at the core of this conflict. It played out in the healthcare debates. If government is not responsible for healthcare, then presumably women would pick up the slack, along with those who do women's work, so-called women's work, namely immigrants and people who are otherwise at the margins of society. As a political scientist friend, Stephen Holmes, observed, healthcare, gendered feminine, was considered too expensive, while the military and Wall Street, gendered masculine, were given a relatively free pass. These patriarchal constructions of masculinity and femininity, however, were directly challenged in the 1960s and '70s by the anti-war movement, the women's movement, and the gay liberation movement. To be a man did not necessarily mean becoming a soldier or preparing oneself for war. To be a woman did not necessitate becoming a mother or preparing oneself to bear and care for children. Sexualities and families could take many forms. The culture wars that followed, making abortion and gay marriage and more recently birth control lightning rod issues in American politics, along with war, signified attempts to put patriarchal structures back in place.
This brings me to my second question: the justice-care debate. To reiterate a major point, care and caring are not women's issues; they are human concerns. Until we make explicit the gendered framing of the justice-care debate, we will continue to be mystified by its seeming intransigence. To see the debate for what it is, look through a gender lens. Justice is aligned with reason, mind, and self, the attributes of so-called rational men. And care with emotion, body, and relationships, feminine qualities that, like women in patriarchy, are at once idealized and devalued. Although the patriarchal framing of the justice-care debate is not acknowledged, the gender binaries and hierarchies catch the listening ear. With this gendering of morality, manhood can readily become a license for carelessness, justified in the name of rights and freedom. And womanhood can imply a willingness to forego rights for the sake of preserving relationships and keeping the peace. But it is absurd to say that men don't care and women are not invested in justice. The different voice then is identified not by gender, but by theme. The difference reflects the joining of reason with emotion, mind with body, the self with relationships, undoing patriarchal splits and hierarchies. It articulates democratic norms and values.
The association of a care voice with women in my research was an empirical observation, admitting exceptions and by no means limited to women. But for reasons I will go into shortly, women are more apt to resist separating themselves from relationships. To give just one illustration, a medical student, when asked, "How would you describe yourself to yourself?" says, "This sounds sort of strange, but I think maternal, with all its connotations. I see myself in a nurturing role, maybe not right now, but whenever that may be, as a physician, as a mother. It's hard to think of myself without thinking of other people." She does not lack a sense of self, but she hears it as strange to describe herself as connected with others rather than standing apart from them. In this way, she alerts us to a culture in which the self is presumed to be separate, and also to the difference between her voice and the one that responds to the same question, "How would you describe yourself to yourself?" by saying, "I would describe myself as an enthusiastic, passionate person who is slightly arrogant, concerned, committed, very tired right now because I didn't get much sleep last night." Different voices. One speaks of relationships in describing the self, and one does not.
When the relational woman is judged to be good, and the autonomous man is perceived as a principled moral agent, morality sanctions and enforces the gender codes of a patriarchal order. In the culture of patriarchy, whether overt or hidden, the different voice with its ethic of care sounds feminine. Heard in its own right and on its own terms, it is simply a human voice. As an ethic of relationship, care addresses problems of oppression and problems of abandonment. A feminist ethic of care crosses the justice-care divide and reframes moral discourse in psychological terms.
Listening to children, we hear their cries. "It's not fair." You hear this, and you, it must be in Spanish too, right? Children say, "It's not fair," because they're less powerful than adults, so they're addressing the unfair use of power. Or the other thing children say is, "You don't care," because children are, they're dependent for their survival on caring. In this sense, care and justice, concerns about care and justice, about oppression and abandonment, are built into the human life cycle. Problems in development, psychological problems, arise when children are pressed to divide their thoughts from their emotions, their minds from their bodies, and their honest voice from their relationships, in the name of being a real boy or a good girl, a real man or a good woman.
At 17, Gail reflects, "I have a tendency to keep things to myself, things that bother me, and anything that interrupts my sense of what I should be, I would kind of soak up into myself as though I were a big sponge." Fernando, a high school senior, one of the boys in Niobi Way's studies of boys' friendships described in her book "Deep Secrets," speaks about becoming a man. Asked what he sees as an ideal friendship, he says, "You gotta be funny, you gotta be truthful. I just gotta have fun with you, you know? Um, you gotta, I guess, just be there for me, I guess. I don't want to sound too sissy-like. I think I've matured in certain ways. I know how to be a man." Gail has learned to soak up anger, her own and that of others, in order to be "what I should be." And Fernando, in learning how to be a man, has learned to regard wanting others to be there for him as "quote." The initiation into patriarchy is driven by gender and enforced by shaming and exclusion. Its telltale signs are a loss of voice and memory and a compromise of the ability to love and the capacity to care. Thus, the initiation of children into a patriarchal order leaves a legacy of loss and some of the scars we associate with trauma.
Twelve-year-old Becca, one of the girls described in "Meeting at the Crossroads," Lynne Michael Brown in my book on women's psychology and girls' development, speaks of losing her sense of herself. "I wasn't being happy, and I wasn't sure of myself. I wasn't being with myself, and I wasn't thinking about myself. I just wanted to have this group of friends. I was losing confidence in myself. I was losing track of myself, really, and losing the kind of person I was." By the end of high school, the boys, the interesting thing about the work with girls was the ability of girls to articulate what they were going through. In other words, what was at stake in this initiation. By the end of high school, the boys in Niobi Way studies spoke of losing their close friendships, meaning friendships in which they shared deep secrets. Nick, a high school senior, said, "I'm not close to anybody now." It's not surprising that these times in development when girls are pressed to lose track of themselves and boys to become emotionally stoic and independent are marked by signs of psychological distress.
The initiation of boys into the gender codes and scripts of patriarchal masculinity, where being a boy means not being a girl or like a girl, begins typically around the time of formal schooling, that is roughly between the ages of four and seven. Boys who are not seen as one of the boys, who do not act like a "real boy," are shamed, excluded, called gays or girls or mama's boys or sissies, and often beaten up. Judy Chu observes this initiation of four and five-year-old boys in her book "When Boys Become 'Boys'." Her title makes the point: boys are humans, caring, empathic, emotionally sensitive, and intelligent, desiring closeness, until they become "boys." The initiation, Chu observes, replays again at the end of adolescence, following the resurgence that adolescence of boys' desire for emotional intimacy and close friendships. The deep secret in Niobi Way's book about boys, adolescent boys' friendships, and the crisis of connection is that boys are humans. And yet, at these times of initiation, it becomes necessary for boys not to show, or perhaps to know, this. Or to take, otherwise, they have to take on the culture of masculinity that is driving them to silence or bury parts of their humanity.
To put a few facts behind these observations: boys' resilience is at heightened risk in the years roughly between five and seven. There is a high incidence among boys at this time, that is when boys start school, of, at least this is true in America, you can tell me if it's true here too, of learning and speech disorders, attention problems, and out-of-touch and out-of-control behavior. Martin Seligman reports that the incidence of depression is higher among boys than it is among girls throughout the childhood years, until adolescence, when it suddenly switches, and there is a sudden high incidence among girls at adolescence. The time of initiation that I've described, of depression and eating disorders and cutting and other forms of destructive behavior, in the late years of high school, the time when Nick says, "I'm not close to anyone now," the suicide rate among boys rises sharply. When children speak of losing track of themselves or losing close friendships, they are describing a crisis of connection, a seeming inability to be with themselves and also with other people.
Listening to them, it becomes easier to understand the tenacity of patriarchal codes and mores, even in societies committed to democratic norms and values. The gender binary and hierarchy become invisible because they have been internalized, incorporated into the psyche. They appear not as manifestations of culture, but as part of nature, part of us. So we end up, and in the human sciences, until this recent paradigm shift, has been mistaking culture for nature, and specifically reading the culture of patriarchy as natural, rather than a something that is associated with psychological distress and signs that are signs of trauma.
I come then to my final question: Why women? Although gender boundaries have become less rigid, and care is increasingly recognized as a human concern, women's voices remain key to bringing these issues to our attention. They are currently leading the move. Women are leading the move within the U.S. to transform the workplace, to make it feasible for both men and women to work and also to care for their families, for people they're close to, and for themselves. The issue here is not essentialism, or for that matter, socialization. Women are not essentially different from men with respect to care and caring, nor are women all the same. But for reasons I've suggested, women's voices, the range of women's voices, are integral to this conversation.
In June of 2010, Logier and her colleagues organized a conference on the ethics of care. It was held in the, in the, at the Sorbonne, in the Salon Descartes. I savored the irony of going to the Salon Descartes to heal Cartesian splits. These splits have blunted our ethical intelligence, fragmented our psyches, short-circuited our neurology, compromised democracy, and jeopardized our survival. We register the loss in our bodies and our emotions, and our lives become tinged with tragedy and trauma. This is an old story. In the new story, the capacity for empathy, mind reading, caring, and cooperation distinguishes us, not as women and men, but as humans. Within ourselves, we have the resources we need. However adverse the political climate, however bad the weather, they accumulate inside where no one can take them away from us. In nature's spring, the time of ripeness when hibernation ceases, happens only once a year. In the psyche, the potential is always present. As the Swedish journalist Sven Lindquist observed, "You already know enough. So do I. It's not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions." The time to act then is now. Thank you very much. Thank you.