My questions are about psychological processes and theory, particularly theories in which men's experience stands for all of human experience--theories which eclipse the lives of women and shut out women's voices. I saw that by maintaining these ways of seeing and speaking about human lives, men were leaving out women, but women were leaving out themselves (p. xiii)

My work is grounded in listening. (p. xiii)

To have a voice is to be human. To have something to say is to be a person. But speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is an intensely relational act. By voice I mean something like what people mean when they speak of the core of the self. Voice is natural and also cultural. It is composed of breath and sound, words, rhythm, and language. and voice is a powerful psychological instrument and channel, connecting inner and outer worlds. (p. xvi)

[Anne Barton says in the introduction to Love's Labour's Lost that] men do not know the women whom they say they love. (p. xvii)

. . . the so-called objective position which Kohlberg and others espoused within the canon of traditional social science research was blind to the particularities of voice and the inevitable constructions that constitute point of view. (p. xviii)

I find the question of whether gender differences are biologically determined or socially constructed to be deeply disturbing. This way of posing the question implies that people, women and men alike, are either genetically determined or a product of socialization--that there is no voice--and without voice, there is no possibility for resistance, for creativity, or for a change whose wellsprings are psychological. At its most troubling, the present reduction of psychology either to sociology or biology or some combination of the two prepares the way for the kind of control that alarmed Hannah Arendt and George Orwell. (p. xix)

Joining this understanding of women's psychological development with theories of human development which turn out to be theories about men, I have arrived at the following working theory: that the relational crisis which men typically experience in early childhood occurs for women in adolescence, that this relational crisis in boys and girls involves a disconnection from women which is essential to the perpetuation of patriarchal societies, and that women's psychological development is potentially revolutionary not only because of women's situation but also because of girls' resistance. (p. xxiii)

I wrote In a Different Voice to bring women's voices into psychological theory and to reframe the conversation between women and men. (p. xxvi)

Psychological theorists . . . implicitly adopting the male life as the norm, have tried to fashion women out of a masculine cloth. (p. 6)

In the life cycle, as in the Garden of Eden, the woman has been the deviant. (p. 6)

Since it is difficult to say “different” without saying “better” or “worse,” since there is a tendency to construct a single scale of measurement, and since that scale has generally been derived from and standardized on the basis of men’s interpretations of research data drawn predominantly or exclusively from studies of males, psychologists “have tended to regard male behavior as the ‘norm’ and female behavior as some kind of deviation from that norm” (p. 14, citing McClelland, 1975, p. 81)

When women do not conform to the standards of psychological expectation, the conclusion has generally been that something is wrong with the women. (p. 14)

While women have taken care of men, men have, in their theories of psychological development, tended to assume or devalue that care. (p. 17)

The discovery now being celebrated by men in mid-life of the importance of intimacy, relationships, and care is something that women have known from the beginning. (p. 17)

The conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules. (p. 19)

The elusive mystery of women's development lies in its recognition of the continuing importance of attachment in the human life cycle. (p. 23)

Only when life-cycle theorists divide their attention and begin to live with women as they have lived with men will their vision encompass the experience of both sexes and their theories become correspondingly more fertile. (p. 23)

As we have listened for centuries to the voices of men and the theories of development that their experience informs, so we have come more recently to notice not only the silence of women but the difficulty in hearing what they say when they speak. Yet in the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection. (p. 174)

The failure to see the different reality of women's lives and to hear the differences in their voices stems in part from the assumption that there is a single mode of social experience and interpretation. (p. 174)