Updated August 7, 2026 at 12:57 PM EDT
Carol Gilligan is arguably one of the most important figures in women’s mental health history.
She was the young Harvard University professor who, in 1982 changed everything about the way women were viewed, challenging her famous male colleagues and icons like Sigmund Freud, who saw men as authoritative and women as “deficient”. She thought otherwise. The male moral voice put emphasis on law, order and justice; the feminine voice on protecting relationships and taking care of people. It was a so-called “care ethics.” It was just different.
Her book was called “In a Different Voice.” It was a blockbuster that also smashed perceptions. It was also blasphemous.
Decades later, and now at New York University School of Law, Gilligan has written a new novel. In it, a married couple faces a crisis. There are affairs. The wife begins to wonder if maybe, though painful, they weren’t shameful. Maybe they were healing.
Then the wife, named Eve goes a step further. She re-examines, through a dance piece she choreographs, the original marriage, Adam and Eve. Maybe, she wonders, Eve wasn’t “less than.” She was Adam’s downfall, but his salvation.
Gilligan’s new novel is “Solstice.” She spoke with Robin Young.
Interview transcript
The character in the book questions the story of Adam and Eve. Do you?
“I had started by writing a short story about a couple dealing with a crisis in their marriage,
and I was interested in how they worked through this crisis with each other. And then I went back and I read the story of Adam and Eve, and then it comes into the novel and leads my fictional Eve to go back and reread the story, and to see things that she had not seen before.”
That is exactly how Carol Gilligan works. You say, ‘Wait a second, I think we’re telling the story of a woman’s voice and ethics the wrong way.’ And here you have someone questioning the story of Adam and Eve. God puts Adam in the Garden of Eden, creates Eve out of his rib. She, through the serpent, tempts Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, which was forbidden. Your character and you, Carol Gilligan, question what in that story?
“In the novel, the daughter of my character Eve says to her, ‘Why are you retelling that story?’ And she says, ‘I’m not retelling it. I’m telling it!’ This was a real discovery, as with my work that led to ‘A Different Voice.’ Then, I was teaching at Harvard [University]. I was teaching the work of Freud and [Erik] Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg and so forth. I didn’t realize that they base all their theories on listening to men, that they hadn’t listened to women.
“I always thought that Eve listened to the wrong person. She should have listened to God. She listened to the serpent, and therefore she disobeyed God. Actually, God says, if you eat the fruit of the tree, you will die. The serpent says you won’t die. Your eyes will be opened.
“She looks at the tree. She looks for herself. The line in the Bible is, ‘And she saw that the tree was good for food and something that would make you wise.’ And she takes some and eats it and gives it to her husband, who was with her. It’s what any person would do. She’s following her own perceptions.
“The other thing that floored me: she eats the fruit and then she gives it to Adam. Nobody dies. It’s after he eats [that] the shaming and the blaming and the hiding begin. The other part of the Adam and Eve story, which is the discovery, is that in the second creation story, that whole question is what Adam needs, and he needs someone to help him by opposing him. So God creates woman. Did that blow your mind?”
Yes. Through the fictional couple you remind us, that’s what a relationship is.
“Yes. At the end, they say they both did that for each other, for each other, oppose each other. And then that wonderful quote from James Baldwin that, if you love someone, you have to tell them what they don’t see.”
But how much of this is maybe autobiographical because Eve is a dancer. You left the psychology profession, academia, at one point to do modern dance.
“This novel is written out of a lifetime of experience. I’m a person who listens. And there’s a certain point I wrote about what I was hearing, ‘In a Different Voice.’ When I was hearing a different voice from the one that is the official voice.
“Yes, having been a dancer and so very much aware of what it means to live in one’s body, and what happens when what you know in your body is at odds with what people are telling you. Those are the questions of the novel.”
Well, we watch Eve and her husband, Gabe, engage in their own dance, going towards each other, breaking apart. Also the husband was a child of the kindertransport, the move to get Jewish children out of Berlin in his case and safe from the Nazis. Even decades after marriage they’re learning about that impact.
“Well, and then how they come to break that silence.”
There’s also an examination of the painful, tortured relationship between the Jewish people and the Palestinians. And one conflict in particular that Gabe, who is a reporter, is covering. How does that fit into this re-examination of relationships?
“In the three strands of the novel, the marriage story and the Adam and Eve story, the Israeli-Palestinian story. In some sense, the same question is asked, which is, is the most interesting question to ask: who’s to blame? I mean, isn’t there a more interesting question that one can ask about where is this conflict coming from? Is there another way? That’s the issue.”
The last time we spoke was in 2023. You had a new non-fiction book, a follow to your ‘In a Different Voice.’ It was called ‘In a Human Voice.’ You looked back and you said, ‘You know what? I wish I hadn’t gendered it as much. It shouldn’t have been the women’s voice, care-ethics. It’s a human voice. A man can have it as well.’
“Yes, there is a paradigm shift in the human sciences now, the realization that as human beings, we all start off as relational, responsive beings. And so to gender that feminine is to take that huge aspect of human experience and assign it to one half of the population as if men didn’t care and as if women weren’t concerned about justice and rights.
“This is exactly where you started. Because at the time, women, we were considered deficient because we were said to be too emotional. We didn’t separate the mind from the body. We were seen as irrational.”
When you say women were seen as irrational or hysterical, what do you think about the big comeback of Freud?
“You know, I want to quote a sentence from Judith Hermann’s remarkable book,‘Trauma and Recovery,’ where she says, for a brief decade, this is in the 1890s, men of science listen to women with a devotion and respect unequaled before or since. Freud in his studies on hysteria, listened to women. He said, the women, the hysterics, they know what is causing their illness, but they may not know that they know it.
“So his job initially was to connect women with our own knowledge. He was initially [on the right track]. And then he, instead of listening to women, started to say that he knew more than his female patients knew. I mean, the big move I made with ‘In a Different Voice,’ I listened to women. And rather than asking how women fit into these theories that had been developed by listening to men, I listened to women. And that changed the voice. But the ‘In a Human Voice’ book says, ‘No, actually, it’s a human voice. And it’s not that it differs from a man’s voice. It differs from a patriarchal voice. It splits human capacities into either male or female.’”
I want to go back to your novel. Eve, your choreographer, re-examining the story of Adam and Eve. Eve is accused of being immoral. It’s said that she has rewritten the familiar narrative. That was said of you as well.
“Oh, that’s interesting.”
You hadn’t thought of that?
“No, I honestly hadn’t thought of that. The critic who reviews her dance performance in The Times accuses him of rewriting the familiar narrative. And what is her response? She says, ‘No, I actually read it!’”
And you, Carol Gilligan, actually listened?
“Yeah, no, that’s true. You know, it’s very humbling because it’s this sense of, just listen, you can hear this.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Robin Young produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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