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Backlash did not effect a setback. Feminist concepts of the life course continued to exist, and in the 1980s, the midlife crisis was contested by Carol Gilligan and other feminist psychologists and social scientists, who often used women’s experiences as a starting point. Gilligan’s critique of androcentric paradigms in developmental theory, begun as a moral justification of abortion, combined a reserved stance against the notion of regret—a powerful tool used by anti-abortion campaigners—with a critique of autonomy and self-reliance. She cast the male midlife crisis not just as an example of immoral and immature behavior but as an act of psychological violence. Gilligan’s perspective was contested, yet even feminist psychologists who disagreed rejected the midlife crisis. In a study of professional women—who did not want to change their lives in middle age—Grace Baruch and Rosalind Barnett reframed the meaning of the midlife crisis in light of psychosocial research on stress: as a sign of rigidity and maladaptation due to the adherence to traditional gender roles. Resonating with debates in feminist circles as much as with emerging new theories of aging, the feminist riposte turned the midlife crisis into a stereotype of chauvinism, thus attesting to the impact of feminist thought.

This chapter claims that the subject matter of moral theory is morality, and that morality is a socially embodied medium of understanding and negotiation over responsibility for things open to human care and effort. Morality is found in practices of responsibility that are not modular with respect to the rest of social life, and that are apt to reflect social differences, including gender, race, and class differences typical in human communities. Feminist ethics, drawing on the work of Carol Gilligan, alleges bias in moral theory and challenges moral reflection and its basis in intuitions when the social perspectives of moral philosophers go unexamined. Contemporary Anglo-American ethics follows a theoretical-juridical model of morality. The chapter introduces an expressive-collaborative model that combines critical and normative reflection on claims to moral knowledge with a significant empirical burden in ethics. It concludes with a new Postscript on recent developments in moral theory.

In 1985 the author wrote an article entitled, ‘Portia In A Different Voice: Speculations on a Women's Lawyering Process’, which explored how gender differences might effect the ways in which lawyers performed their tasks, structured their work, made ethical decisions, and made and enforced the law. The article was a speculation on and application of the then very popular theories of a noted educational psychologist, Carol Gilligan. The character of Portia from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice was used to illustrate the oppositional ethics that exist in any problem of justice or moral reasoning. She ascribed in the reading of Portia — disguised as a male jurist and variously interpreted to be a lawyer, judge, legal envoy, or law clerk — a lawyer who appealed to the equitable, contextual, merciful sides of law, rather than to the draconian certainty of rules and universal principles. This chapter first reviews the initial arguments and claims of those who used the structure and findings of Gilligan's work to create a claim of an ‘ethic of care’ based on a women's lawyering process, differentiated from the more conventional and accepted male norm of lawyering. Secondly, it reviews the theoretical, empirical, and methodological critiques of this work that emerged in the years following publication, as well as debate about these claims. Thirdly, it reports on some of the emerging empirical tests of these claims. Fourthly, it re-explores the role that the metaphors and images of the character of Portia play in this debate.

The ethics of care is a distinct moral theory, not merely a concern that can be added on to or included within the most influential moral theories such as Kantian morality, utilitarianism, or virtue ethics. The ethics of care arose out of feminists’ appreciation of the importance of care and caring labor. As a fully normative theory, it has developed far beyond its earliest formulations in the work of Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, and Nel Noddings. It is recognized as highly relevant to political and global contexts as well as to the more personal ones of family and friendship. It includes concern for transforming the structures within which practices of care take place, so that they are no longer oppressive. The ethics of care has the great advantage in a moral theory of being based on experience that is truly universal: the experience of having been cared for.

This chapter provides a critical analysis of causal explanations of vertical occupational sex segregation (VOSS). It evaluates the representative theories from three major ‘explanatory camps’: psychological and psycho-physiological theories, theories of patriarchy, and human capital-based theories. The chapter explores the work both of more ‘traditional’ advocates of each camp, and of some theorists who have attempted to develop their fields. It specifically looks at Steven Goldberg's Male Dominance Theory, Simon Baron-Cohen's Empathising/Systemising Theory, and Carol Gilligan's Different Voice thesis. Moreover, Sylvia Walby and Valerie Bryson's Patriarchy Theory is elaborated. Then, Rational Choice Theory by Gary Becker, and Preference Theory by Catherine Hakim, are highlighted. The limitations of each of the theoretical approaches, and the ways in which each camp tends to assume a false homogeneity among women, irrespective of various claims to the contrary, are noted.

There seems to be a tension between the present book and care ethics, as practiced by the present author and others. Care ethics privileges thinking traditionally associated with women, but the present book argues that various goods/virtues that patriarchy assigns to only one of the genders actually apply with equal relevance to both. But fully developed care ethics takes in concepts like justice and autonomy that are traditionally associated with men and so as a form of theorizing (something also associated more with men than with women) actually achieves a balance between male and female elements. There is no tension here with the ideas of the present book. The present theory also differs from Romanticism, which allows for the possibility of perfection, but if one takes the Berlinian viewpoint together with care ethics, one can make a two-pronged attack on the Greek and Enlightenment idea that all the virtues can be harmoniously united under the aegis of reason.

In her influential book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan argues that women and men construe moral problems differently and that these differences have important implications for moral theory. Her discussion is built around a series of contrasts: she maintains, among other things, that women’s moral thought tends to be concrete and contextual rather than abstract, personal rather than impersonal, and oriented to care rather than duty. However, this chapter argues that these and related oppositions have always been part of the moral problematic and that their introduction sheds little new light on the theoretical options that are available to us.

Chapter 3 contributes to the analysis of women’s security and insecurity by paying attention to the multiple voices of the combat veteran. Carol Gilligan’s “Listening Guide” is applied as a platform for evaluating the experiences of women soldiers. The chapter thus presents another deconstruction of binary perceptions in research epistemology through disaggregating the voices and silences of women combat veterans. The combatants’ narratives bring to light their gendered and political reflections about their military service and the political and armed conflict that surrounds them. By tuning in and listening to distinct aspects of their narratives regarding their experiences, the analysis shows that most of the ex-combatants indicated that their service had been an important milestone that changed their lives for the better and made them more mature and confident. While some of them were critical of the political leadership, most chose to discuss only personal, gendered, and social experiences.

This chapter offers an in-depth discussion of two specifically feminist moral theories. It opens with a discussion of the ethics of care, followed by criticisms and how they can be addressed. Then it takes up what might be called a feminist ethics of responsibility, which stresses the importance of relationships other than caring ones. Here, morality is depicted as practices of responsibility that may be thrust upon one, contested, accepted, delegated, deflected, and so on, and that are often epistemically rigged in favor of those in positions of power. The chapter closes by pointing out that both feminist moral theories insist on the fundamental importance of human relationships, are keenly attentive to unjust power imbalances, and begin with nonideal, real-time personal interactions.

Moral psychology coevolves with natural and social ecologies. Every human is born into a tradition at a particular place and time. This means first, that identity is formed in a way that attaches us to a tradition; second, that standards of good and bad, right and wrong, are constrained by our Darwinian animal nature and the way the natural and social world we are born into are; and third, that moralities will have significant local coloration., This chapter explores how twentieth-century moral psychology in the work of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Carol Gilligan and E. O. Wilson’s sociobiology account for these features of morality, and whether and how the genealogy of morality matters to normative ethics.