Success Quote by Carol Gilligan

Success, Gilligan suggests, doesn’t end a fight; it changes the weather. Her point isn’t that feminism has “lost its way,” but that it has won enough to trigger a predictable backlash. The line “different form” is doing careful work: it frames today’s turbulence not as ideological collapse but as a phase shift, where power concedes less by arguing less. Instead, it redirects energy into confusion, fatigue, and factionalism.

The subtext is classic Gilligan: the psychological battlefield matters as much as the legislative one. “Divide women from one another” isn’t just about partisan splits; it’s about manufacturing mistrust inside relationships and movements, turning solidarity into suspicion. The verb “foment” is telling. Divisiveness is not treated as organic disagreement but as something cultivated - seeded, tended, amplified - until it feels inevitable and self-generated. That’s how counter-movements protect the status quo: not by refuting the cause, but by making the coalition ungovernable.

Contextually, Gilligan emerged as a major voice by challenging male-centered models of moral development, insisting that what looked like “difference” often reflected whose experience was being measured. This quote extends that critique outward. If the women’s movement has been “effective,” then the backlash will aim to reassert the old metrics: who counts as a “real” woman, whose pain is legitimate, which choices are respectable. The genius of the counter-movement, in her telling, is that it recruits women into policing one another - a strategy that’s cheaper than coercion and harder to name.