[3] She is married to James Gilligan, M.D., who directed the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School.

Jonathan has also collaborated with his mother, to write the play The Scarlet Letter (a feminist adaptation of Hawthorne's novel) and the libretto for the opera Pearl.

[7] Timothy Gilligan is the vice-chair for Education and associate professor of medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute.

Gilligan taught for two years at the University of Cambridge (from 1992 to 1994) as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions and as a visiting professorial fellow in the Social and Political Sciences.

Gilligan studied women's psychology and girls' development and co-authored or edited a number of texts with her students.

As his research assistant, Gilligan argued that Kohlberg's stages were male-oriented, which limited their ability to be generalized to females.

The masculine voice is "logical and individualistic",[15] meaning that the emphasis in moral decisions is protecting the rights of people and making sure justice is upheld.

Gilligan argues that androgyny, or integrating the masculine and the feminine, is the best way to realize one's potential as a human.

Gilligan's stages of female moral development has been shown in business settings as an explanation to the different ways men and women handle ethical issues in the workplace as well.

She followed Kohlberg's stages of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional morality, but she based these upon her research with women rather than men, a major advance in psychological theory.

This stage involves women paying attention to how their actions affect others, and taking responsibility for those consequences, good and bad.

In a Different Voice by Gilligan goes deeper into her criticism of Kohlberg and the moral development stages of women, and was one of the accomplishments that put her at the forefront of the feminist movement.

Before she conducted her research Gilligan knew that "psychologists had assumed a culture in which men were the measure of humanity, and autonomy and rationality ('masculine' qualities) were the markers of maturity.

By using Kohlberg's six stages of moral development, Gilligan attempts to analyze both the boy and girl's answers to the question of whether a man should steal medicine to save his wife.

Gilligan concludes this section saying how Freud is not necessarily correct in saying that girls have an intensification of narcissism during puberty, but that they develop a deeper perspective of care and "a new responsiveness to the self".

But this association is not absolute and the contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus on a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex.

In Marilyn N. Metzl's book review on The Birth of Pleasure, she says:Gilligan's book traces love's path as she studies children's communication and couples in crisis, and argues persuasively that a child's inborn ability to love freely and live authentically becomes inhibited by patriarchal structure.

Gilligan demonstrates how parents and patriarchal culture reinforces the loss of voice in girls while simultaneously forcing and shaming sons into masculine behavior characterized by assertion and aggression.

Girls or boys who challenge this system and assume the role of the opposite sex are severely punished by the culture.

[25] Gilligan, Annie G. Rogers, and Deborah L. Tolman worked together to produce Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance.

[26] Gilligan, Nona P. Lyons, and Trudy J. Hanmer wrote Making Connections: The Relational Worlds at Emma Willard School.

This book includes the voices of girls in adolescence to further examine their ideas of self, relationship, and morality, which are all crucial to the psychology of human development.

[32] In early fall of 2002, Gilligan released a theater adaptation of The Scarlet Letter, originally written by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

She related how the patriarchy not only maintains strict gender roles, but also how it prevents true pleasure in relationships between people.

Gilligan said that Hawthorne was demonstrating that "you could overthrow kings, and still the tension between puritanical society and love and passion would continue".

In her 2011 article about In a Different Voice, Gilligan says she has made "a distinction [she] ha[s] come to see as pivotal to understanding care ethics.

The different modes of reasoning are therefore a socially constructed dichotomy simply reproducing itself through our expectations of how women and men act.

[34] Christina Hoff Sommers argued that Gilligan's research is ill-founded and that no evidence exists to support her conclusion.

[35][page needed] Dennis M. Senchuk makes a different critique of Gilligan's work, saying she uses hypothetical dilemmas in her theory.