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. . . the so-called objective position which
Kohlberg and others espoused within the canon of traditional social science
research was blind to the particularities of voice and the inevitable
constructions that constitute point of view. (p. xviii)
I find the question of whether gender differences are biologically determined
or socially constructed to be deeply disturbing. This way of posing the
question implies that people, women and men alike, are either genetically
determined or a product of socialization--that there is no voice--and without
voice, there is no possibility for resistance, for creativity, or for a change
whose wellsprings are psychological. At its most troubling, the present
reduction of psychology either to sociology or biology or some combination of
the two prepares the way for the kind of control that alarmed Hannah Arendt
and George Orwell. (p. xix)
When women do not conform to the standards of psychological expectation, the
conclusion has generally been that something is wrong with the women. (p. 14)
The discovery now being celebrated by men in mid-life of the importance of
intimacy, relationships, and care is something that women have known from the
beginning. (p. 17)
As we have listened for centuries to the voices of men
and the theories of development that their experience informs, so we have
come more recently to notice not only the silence of women but the difficulty
in hearing what they say when they speak. Yet in the different voice of
women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and
responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection.
(p. 174)
The failure to see the different reality of women's lives and to hear the
differences in their voices stems in part from the assumption that there is a
single mode of social experience and interpretation. (p. 174)
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