Daily Inspiration Quote by Carol Gilligan

Gilligan drops a mischievous grenade into one of the oldest cultural scripts we have: origin stories that pretend to explain "human nature" while quietly policing gender. By starting with "of course", she mocks the reflex to treat Genesis as baseline evidence, the way a myth gets smuggled in as sociology. The line is funny because it’s structurally unfair: it sets up the pious authority of Adam and Eve, then swerves into a punchline about bureaucratic manufacturing errors. Trouble, here, isn’t sin so much as the predictable fallout of a bad premise.

The subtext is classic Gilligan: critique the way women are framed as derivative. Eve as an afterthought, literally made from man, becomes a metaphor for how institutions build "woman" out of male defaults - male norms in psychology, ethics, and development that women are then judged against. If you engineer femininity as a variation of masculinity, Gilligan implies, you don’t get harmony; you get distortion, resentment, and a culture that blames women for the mismatch it designed.

Context matters. Gilligan’s career is an extended argument with a field that treated the male subject as universal and women as the problem case. The joke isn’t anti-woman; it’s anti-template. It calls out the narrative trick where "female trouble" is baked into the origin story, so the diagnosis is always ready-made: if something goes wrong, look for Eve. Gilligan flips that: the trouble starts with how the story is built.