carol gilligan and rachel adler

Carol Gilligan's 1982 book, In a Different Voice:Psychological Theory and Women's Development(Harvard University Press)was a classic almost from the moment of publication. Gilligan believed that something might have been missed by developmental psychologists who built their theories after studies of the lives and thoughts of boys and men. She was particularly interested in the work of her own mentor, Lawrence Kohlberg, who, building upon Piaget's cognitive development theory, had created a six stage model of moral development. Her contribution, however, went well beyond the work of Kohlberg's and had implications for developmental theories such as Erik Erikson's and others.
Gilligan's work has provoked a great deal of criticism from feminists who are angered by the potential harm to feminist interests in the idea that women and men are fundamentally different, a concept known as gender essentialism. Others have pointed out that Gilligan herself is limited in her theorizing as the girls and women she studied were from a small,elite, culturally limited sample of humanity.
Gilligan staunchly defends herself against these misunderstandings of her work. As Gilligan wrote in 2001, the title of her book was deliberate, " In a Different Voice"--not "In a Woman's Voice." Readers who have criticized Gilligan for introducing gender essentialism have failed entirely to see her point. In Feminism in the Study of Religion: A Reader, Gilligan reminds her critics that in the introduction to her book she had tried to clearly state that she was not suggesting an essential gender distinction, but simply pointing out, as an empirical observation, what was lost by defining the normative using only a sample of males.
From the introduction:

The contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex."(p. 124)
The important point is that Gilligan herself was not making any claim about the biological origin of these voices or their consistency across different cultures, something her critics have often chided her for. Rather, her insight about the limitations of research on men and boys could equally be applied to the limitations in basing psychological theory on research subjects who are exclusively middle class or exclusively Christian.
The relevance to psychology and religion should be clear. Whenever a psychological theory defines human nature, one ought to be on guard. Whose human nature? Gilligan looks at issues like justice vs. care or separation vs. connection and wonders why certain ways of seeing become the normative ones. We might look, as she did, to the gender biases of the author and the choice of subjects he/she has studied. We might also look to the religious ideas that shape the way a person might think about what it means to be human. One of the best pieces describing a rabbinic Jewish "anthropology," is Rachel Adler's wonderful piece,Rachel Adler, “A Question of Boundaries: Toward a Jewish Feminist Theology of Self and Others,” Tikkun, Vol 6, #3

Here is Clark Williamson discussing this thesis of Adler:
We recur to the Pirke Aboth, where, five paragraphs after our prior quote, Joshua ben Perahyah says: "Provide thyself with a teacher and getthee a fellow-disciple [student]..." In a later development of this tradition of studying Torah with one another, The Teachings of Rabbi Natan say: "a person should set himself a companion, to eat with him, drink with him, study Bible with him, study Mishnah with him, sleep with him, and reveal to him all his secrets, secrets of Torah and secrets of worldly things." Rachel Adler argues that this rabbinic text describes a distinctively Jewish kind of intimacy: the study- companion relationship, that of the chaverim.The chaverim do not simply study texts;the structure of their relationship and the nature of its boundaries present a Jewish model for the relation between the self and the other.

In it, people experience each other as wholes, not as fragmented beings.Companionship is physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Chaverim study together by questioning one another. They question lovingly and love questions. Such an understanding of boundaries seems to lie at the heart of Paul's theology. The root of chaver means to join together at the boundaries. Boundaries define the shape and extent of an entity, and distinguish between what is inside and what is out.They maintain its integrity and keep it from dribbling out into everything else. Being "joined together at the boundaries" is the kind of relationship reflected in Paul's approach to boundaries--that they should be transcended without being destroyed. God's gracious love overflows boundaries and requires its recipients not only to love God in return, but to love the neighbor and thestranger as we love ourselves. Some boundaries are like the Berlin Wall--fronted by land mines, topped with barbed wire, guarded by machine guns. Others serve to facilitate interaction with the environment. Adler points out that a cell membrane, for example, is part of the living substance of the cell. It is the perimeter at which the cell works out its reciprocity with other cells--the relations that maintain its life within its context. This Torah of self and other grounds our capacity to be chaverim and our capacity to create tzedek, justice-as-righteousness, to embody the Torah of self and other in a social matrix that allows all human beings to flourish. This understanding of boundary as elastic and semi-permeable, that both defines theself and requires bonding with the other, points to the reality of mutual interconnectedness.Such communion attests that we inhabit a single context, and within that context we live deeply within one another's boundaries. The only way to in/habit is to co/habit. The fantasy of the impermeable self or religious boundary is a snare and a delusion.