Joining the Resistance

Since the publication of her landmark book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan has transformed the way we think about women and menand the relations between them. It was 'the little book thatstarted a revolution', and with more than 800,000 copies inprint it has become one of the most widely read and influentialbooks ever written on gender and human development.

In her new book Joining the Resistance Carol Gilliganreflects on the evolution of her thinking and shows how her keyideas were interwoven with her own life experiences. Her work beganwith the question of voice: who is speaking to whom, in what body, telling what stories about which relationships? By listeningcarefully she heard a voice that had been held in silence, and inthe process realized the extent to which we - both women andmen - had been telling false stories about ourselves.

In her subsequent work Gilligan found that adolescent girlsresisted pressures to disengage themselves from their honestvoices, and by joining their resistance she opened the way for thedevelopment of a more humane way of thinking about personal andpolitical relationships. For the central conviction of her worktoday - and the central thesis of this book - is thatthe requisites for love and the requisites for citizenship in ademocratic society are one and the same. Both voice and the desireto live in relationships inherent in our human nature, togetherwith the capacity to resist false authority.

Combining autobiographical reflection with an analysis of keyquestions about gender and human development, this timely andhighly readable book by one of America's greatestcontemporary thinkers will appeal to a wide readership.