Speaking and listening are a form of psychic breathing.
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.
Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows.
While an ethic of justice proceeds from the premise of equality – that everyone should be treated the same – an ethic of care rests on the premise of nonviolence – that no one should be hurt.
While men represent powerful activity as assertion and aggression, women in contrast portray acts of nurturance as acts of strength.
I find the question of whether gender differences are biologically determined or socially constructed to be deeply disturbing.
The hardest times for me were not when people challenged what I said, but when I felt my voice was not heard.
Both love and democracy depend on voice – having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard.
I’ve found that if I say what I’m really thinking and feeling, people are more likely to say what they really think and feel. The conversation becomes a real conversation.
I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy.
The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life.
At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered.
Women have traditionally deferred to the judgment of men although often while intimating a sensibility of their own which is at variance with that judgment.
It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve – a story which shows among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble.
Everything about women is in perpetual crisis.
Theory can blind observation.
Caring requires paying attention, seeing, listening, responding with respect. Its logic is contextual, psychological. Care is a relational ethic, grounded in a premise of interdependence. But it is not selfless.
Women’s deference is rooted not only in their social subordination but also in the substance of their moral concern. Sensitivity to the needs of others and the assumption of responsibility for taking care lead women to attend to voices other than their own and to include in their judgement other points of view.
Living at once inside and outside the framework, Hester is able to see the frame.
This knotted dilemma lies at the center of women’s development. How can girls both enter and stay outside of, be educated in and then try to change, what for millennia has been a man’s world?