"Many women have told me they remember where they were when they read the book, and how they felt suddenly that what they really thought or felt about things made sense"
About this Quote
Memory here isn’t nostalgia; it’s evidence. Gilligan’s line treats a reader’s “where were you when you read it” moment like a cultural landmark, the way people recall a blackout or a verdict. That’s deliberate. She’s describing not just a book that persuades, but one that reorganizes a person’s internal map: the shock of recognition when private thoughts snap into public language.
The subtext is an indictment of the default settings of authority. If “what they really thought or felt” only “made sense” after encountering Gilligan’s work, then the surrounding culture - including mainstream psychology - has been training women to treat their moral intuitions as suspect, messy, or merely emotional. Her phrasing is telling: not “I agreed with the argument,” but “I felt suddenly” and “made sense.” She’s naming a conversion from self-doubt to coherence, from being a case study in someone else’s framework to becoming the interpreter of one’s own experience.
Context matters. Gilligan’s career rose alongside second-wave feminism and a major dispute over how psychology measured moral development, often using male-coded ideals of autonomy, rules, and abstraction as the yardstick. Her work argued that care, relationship, and context aren’t moral weakness; they’re moral intelligence. The quote’s intent is quietly political: it frames reading as a kind of consciousness-raising, and it validates feeling not as an add-on to thinking, but as a form of knowing that had been waiting for permission to count.
The subtext is an indictment of the default settings of authority. If “what they really thought or felt” only “made sense” after encountering Gilligan’s work, then the surrounding culture - including mainstream psychology - has been training women to treat their moral intuitions as suspect, messy, or merely emotional. Her phrasing is telling: not “I agreed with the argument,” but “I felt suddenly” and “made sense.” She’s naming a conversion from self-doubt to coherence, from being a case study in someone else’s framework to becoming the interpreter of one’s own experience.
Context matters. Gilligan’s career rose alongside second-wave feminism and a major dispute over how psychology measured moral development, often using male-coded ideals of autonomy, rules, and abstraction as the yardstick. Her work argued that care, relationship, and context aren’t moral weakness; they’re moral intelligence. The quote’s intent is quietly political: it frames reading as a kind of consciousness-raising, and it validates feeling not as an add-on to thinking, but as a form of knowing that had been waiting for permission to count.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
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