I have never read anything by Carol Gilligan although I am somewhat familiar with her book, In a Different Voice. How could anyone who was in college in the mid-80s not be? She did sort of start a revolution. Almost all of my female professors were talking about it. Men focus on rules, women on relationships so how we make moral decisions is different. Men are not morally superior to women, they simply have a different approach to morality. That was truly huge back in the day! Especially having grown up in a heavily fundamentalist Christian area where women were expected to submit to men because the Bible had deemed them morally inferior.

Potential Spoiler Warning!

Kyra is about a woman whose husband was murdered 10 years or so ago by her half-brother. She’s had no interest in other men, considering herself to be still married. But she meets Andreas, a Director of Opera and she falls in love and begins letting go of her first marriage. But then Andreas suddenly leaves without warning and Kyra falls apart. She no longer knows what is real - the typical existential crisis.

To help her through the crisis, she goes into therapy with Greta, an older woman. Like Gilligan, Greta believes therapy is “tragically” flawed - especially for women who are asked to submit themselves to the rules. At some point in the therapy, woman cease to make progress. They hit a wall with the therapy that men do not and Greta offers a lecture explaining that this is very likely thanks to the difference in men and women.

Andreas leave Kyra without telling her because he fully expects her to understand that he cannot stay. He has internal rules he must obey and he thinks Kyra is as obedient to those rules as she is. But being female, she is far more tuned into the relationship than to the rules so is devastated when he leaves. She is likewise troubled by the “ending” in therapy. Therapy is a sort of “love” relationship but when it is over. This understandably frustrates Kyra and she and her therapist courageously work through ways to break through the old, masculine structure.

I had a very difficult time connecting to the characters. I didn’t really like Kyra or Andreas, in part because I had a very difficult time picturing them. I’d have an image and then Gilligan would add something that would dash it. But Gilligan’s not a novelist and I’m sure her intention was not to create the next great novel. She was trying to convey something through story telling and I think it worked, however awkward the story. (I don’t understand why we didn’t get to travel to Thailand with Kyra and experience the shift she experienced there - it seemed important but goes, has some sort of enlightening experience, but we don’t get to share it with her. We have to hear about it in a lecture.)

Going through some of what I highlighted:

Kyra to Andreas talking about her first husband, Simon: “I don’t think you can fall in love with a man unless you fall in love with his work.” Do you think this is true? I am not at all in love with my husband’s work. I have major issues with it and sometimes it bothers me a lot - it would be nice to be married to someone who is really passionate about what he does and is making a difference in the world through his work. But for the most part, my husband likes what he does and feels that he makes a difference in the small circles he inhabits at work by just being who he is and not fully buying into the corporate mentality. But I couldn’t do what he does - it would be like death to me. Of course, I’m not so sure Kyra is so in love with Andreas’ work even though she admires it so perhaps this comment is really more about being reliant upon the structures that have been created by man. Kyra realizes much later in the book that her relationship to Simon isn’t perfect and that he required a subtle submission she hadn’t noticed until her work in therapy.

Kyra to Greta (the therapist): “But the problem is not just that women need to discover they can change the structures in which they living. That’s what my work is about, changing the structure. It’s why do you set up this situation, this structure, in the irst place. Why wet up a relationship with an ending built in? You’re asking women to buy this, but my question is, why have you bought it?” This makes the therapist mad. What Kyra recognizes is that therapy is structured in such a way that the patients problem is really just their problem and exists separately from the therapist. If the therapist withholds her feelings or manipulates them, it’s confuses Kyra’s feelings. Greta’s answer? This is the way she knows how to work. It was how she was trained - she knows therapy is inherently flawed, but she hadn’t questioned the structure in the way Kyra is questioning it and she now fully realizes. Which, of course, always makes us angry at first. It’s terrifying to take away those railings.

Speaking of railings, my husband and I had an interesting discussion about Kyra’s dream of walking out on the narrow bridge and realizing there are no railings but she’s too far out to go back. My husband asked me what it felt like to me to have the railings taken away and I said it felt like freedom. He said for him, it felt like chaos. I really do think Gilligan is on to something here. We women are used to a structure of submission and that submission is built into the structures of society - physical and idealogical. Submitting yourself to something greater than yourself generally requires an absence of railings. But submission to the so-called “stronger gender” is a different baby altogether. It’s a sort of bondage - not the freedom inherent in the paradoxical, mystical submission “to God”, wisdom, trust, etc.

The idea of wanting to know what is real makes a lot of sense to me. I could see cutting myself, like Kyra did, to try and figure that out - especially when what seems to be so connected turns out to be yet another superficiality. It gets extremely tiresome to have parents and societal authorities tell us who it is we are and who we are supposed to be. There is almost no concern whatsoever about who it is we are.

My parents sent me to college to ensure that I’d meet a man who would be able to take care of me financially.   Going to school had nothing to do with getting a degree in something that interested me.   When I married a man who didn’t have a college degree, they didn’t show up to the wedding. I got a telegram from them on my wedding day, and then didn’t hear from them again for 6 months. I didn’t submit to their rules.    From their perspective, I’d been disloyal.  But from my perspective, I was being loyal to myself.  And even though the marriage ended unhappily, I learned far more about myself through that troubled marriage than had I followed their rules.

At some point, when you begin to trust yourself, the reigning rules and structures do begin to feel incredibly superficial.   It’s easy to think reality is based upon the structures we are born into or are trained with.  But do a bit of interior digging.  You soon realize that structure influences the experience of reality, but otherwise has very little to do with it. AND! It’s the relationship of the individual to the structure that creates the experience of reality.  We can’t know reality in any other way except through relationship.  That’s why both Kyra and Andreas were trying to a develop a fluidity within their respective structures rather than a structure that requires submission to it’s rules.