Please ONLY use this reference and NO OUTSIDE SOURCES!!!!!!
- Gilligan, C. (2003). Pp. 1-63, 169-180, 233-235.The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love. New York, NY: Random House.
1. Using Gilligan’s The Birth of Pleasure (this week’s reading—lecture helps too!), describe how girls and boys come to deny their “true selves.”Where can you see this happening? (Where did Gilligan see it happening?) At what age does it happen?
2. WHY do girls and boys come to deny their “true selves?” What does patriarchy have to do with this phenomenon?Again, use Gilligan as support for your discussion.
3. Now use personal experience.Do you think this happened in your life? Do you see evidence of this dynamic in other people's love relationships? In love relationships as portrayed on TV and in the movies? Have you seen this happen with any children you know?
4. How do you think this socialization into a patriarchal social structure affects heterosexual love relationships?
Your initial post should be at least 250 words long.
The Birth of Pleasure Contents Title Page Dedication Epigraph Acknowledgments I A Radical Geography of Love II Regions of Light III The Birth of Pleasure A Note on Sources Bibliography Permissions Acknowledgments Also by Carol Gilligan Copyright Page For Jim The power of love upsets the order of things. GENESIS RABBAH LV8 Acknowledgments This book was conceived in love, and I am grateful to the many people who encouraged and inspired me. I would like to thank the couples who opened their lives to me, the girls who showed me a path, and the young boys and their parents who filled in a vital part of the map. Their voices were the grounding to which I repeatedly returned. My thanks to the students who became my colleagues in these projects; their perceptions and insights were a great gift. Thanks also to the writers whose books became so integral to my exploration. Normi Noel was my soul’s companion on this journey; hers was the ear on which I relied. At the final stages of writing, I walked with Tina Packer every morning, and her insights into the larger themes of the book opened many doors for me. She too has drawn deeply from the well of Psyche and Cupid and tracked Shakespeare’s women in her play Women of Will. Kristin Linklater’s illumination of “the natural voice” and the process of freeing it lit my way into the psyche; as co–artistic directors of the theater troupe The Company of Women, we joined our work. Mary Hamer was a writing pal and her bold work, an inspiration. Terry Real became a best friend; his invitation to join him in doing couples therapy was an invitation into understanding how deeply truth is entwined with love. David Richards also became a best friend, and teaching with him, a special pleasure. His work on the Abolitionist Feminists, his interpretation of the Constitution, and his analysis of the liberation movements of the twentieth century spurred me to think about the relationship between love and democracy. Jean Baker Miller opened my life to new ways of seeing and has stood as a beacon for me. Several people encouraged this project at crucial junctures: Kate Medina above all. I am grateful to Rachel Kadish for her novelist’s eye and to the other members of my writers’ workshop in Cambridge—Kathleen Cleaver, Laura Harrington, and Florence Ladd. Thanks to Helaine and Yorick Blumenfeld, Peggy Davis, Tova and Moshe Halbertal, Marsha Levy- Warren, Lisby Mayer, Wendy Puriefoy, and Joel Revzen for their insights and wisdom; to Denise DeCosta for alerting me to Anne Frank’s editing of her diary; to Simon Goldhill, Mary Beard, and Froma Zeitlin for discussing Apuleius with me; to Bessel van der Kolk for conversations about trauma; to Jonathan Gilligan for conversations about action at a distance; and to Ruby Blondell, Emily Hass, Wendy Kesselman, Nanci Kincaid, and Dennis Krausnick. Elizabeth Debold, Diana de Vegh, Dana Jack, Donald Levy, Deborah Luepnitz, Cindy Ness, Christina Robb, and Daniella Varon generously read and commented on early drafts. I benefited from the opportunity to present parts of this work and from the discussions that followed at Princeton University, the University of Cambridge in England, the Cambridge Hospital/Stone Center conferences on learning from women, the Austen Riggs Center, Robert Jay Lifton’s Wellfleet Seminar, the symposium commemorating the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, the Northwestern Family Therapy Institute, the Women’s Therapy Center, Facing History and Ourselves, the Ms. Foundation board retreat, the Roger Williams Law School in Rhode Island, and the Examiners Club in Boston. I also benefited from the thoughtful responses of members of my seminar at the NYU law school. For encouraging and supporting the research on girls’ development and the women teaching girls/girls teaching women projects, I am grateful to the Boston Foundation, the Cleveland Foundation, the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation, the Gund Foundation, the Lily Endowment, and the Spencer Foundation. Emily Fisher and Elizabeth Hobbs, together with Nancy Aronson and an anonymous donor initiated and endowed Harvard’s first chair in Gender Studies at the Graduate School of Education. My thanks to Patricia Albjerg Graham, Jerry Murphy, and my colleagues at Harvard for making this happen; the research endowment given to the Chair by the Spencer Foundation supported the research with boys. An anonymous donor funded the study of marriages in crisis, and the Cambridge Family Institute and the Gender Studies program at Harvard supported the project with couples in therapy. To Jane Fonda, my thanks for her vision and generosity, for taking the map of this book and working to make its vision a reality. A special thanks to Virgina Kahn, to the principals and teachers who welcomed and joined my research, to Jane Rabb and the late Frances West, and to Judy Chu, Miriam Raider-Roth, Ilina Singh, and Renee Spencer— graduate students at Harvard—and Carol Kaplan and Eliza Patten at New York University School of Law for work that inspired me. I am grateful to my colleagues at NYU for their friendship; special thanks to John Sexton for asking me what I needed and providing it. In the course of writing, I relied on Nancy Costerisan, Gloria Rieger, Marion Rutledge, and Sarah Thorne to remind me of the beauty of houses and gardens and the wisdom of the body. My heartfelt thanks to Willie Mae Jackson for keeping the spirit of my parents alive along with her own, to my cousin Bette Caminez Kroening, to Alexia Panayiotou and her parents for offering their beach house in Cyprus as a writing retreat, to David Hartman and the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and to my stellar research assistant, Tatiana Bertsch. Thanks to John Brockman for his steadying presence and to Sonny Mehta for being a friend to this writer. Most of all, I have relied on the talents of Victoria Wilson, who brought her discerning eye to this work and urged me to walk into those places where I hesitated to go. My family has inspired me to write about pleasure. I thank my sons, Jon, Tim, and Chris Gilligan, for all the pleasures they have brought me and for bringing Vicki Greene, Heather Gornik, and Golbarg Niknejad into my life. Nora Gilligan, my granddaughter, embodies joy. Jacob Gilligan's birth gives new meaning to pleasure. To Jim, my thanks for encouraging me always to realize my dreams; he is my deepest friend, my love. I A Radical Geography of Love Let it be Like wild flowers, Suddenly, an imperative of the field . . . —YEHUDA AMICHAI For years, without knowing why, I have been drawn to maps of the desert, drawn by descriptions of the winds and the wadi—dry watercourses that suddenly fill with rain. I began following an ancient story about love told in North Africa in the second century, written in the coastal city of Carthage, carried into Europe as the winds carry the desert sand, falling like rain into a tradition whose origins lie in the birth of tragedy, coursing through the centuries like an underground stream. Set in the landscape of tragedy, this story leads to the birth of pleasure. Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, quiet, steady, filling the earth, collecting in hidden springs. When it rains, when we love, new life grows. So that to say, as Moses coming down from Sinai said, that there are two roads, one leading to life and one to death, and therefore choose life, is to say in effect: choose love. But what is the way? I picked up the ancient road map of love at a time when relationships between women and men were changing. The waves of liberation that swept through American society in the second half of the twentieth century, freeing love from many constraints, set in motion a process of transformation. In a historic convergence, the civil rights movement, which galvanized a moral consensus against enslavement, was followed by the anti-war movement and the women’s movement, initiating a conversation about freedom that included freedom from long-standing ideals of manhood and womanhood. For a man to be a man, did he have to be a soldier, or at least prepare himself for war? For a woman to be a woman, did she have to be a mother, or at least prepare herself to raise children? Soldiers and mothers were the sacrificial couple, honored by statues in the park, lauded for their willingness to give their lives to others. The gay liberation movement drew people’s attention to men’s love for men and women’s for women and also men’s love for women who were not the objects of their sexual desire and women’s love for men who were not their economic protectors. In the 1990s, for the first time since suffrage, women’s votes elected the president, more women were gaining an economic foothold, and wealth began shifting into the hands of young men who bypassed the usual channels of advancement. The tension between democracy and patriarchy was out in the open. Democracy rests on an ideal of equality in which everyone has a voice. Patriarchy, although frequently misinterpreted to mean the oppression of women by men, literally means a hierarchy—a rule of priests—in which the priest, the hieros, is a father. It describes an order of living that elevates fathers, separating fathers from sons (the men from the boys) and placing both sons and women under a father’s authority. With the renaissance of women’s voices in the late twentieth century, with sons questioning the authority of fathers, especially with respect to war, with the revolution in technology reducing the need for a priesthood by providing direct access to knowledge, the foundations of patriarchy were eroding. I was searching at the time for a washed-out road. Picking up the voice of pleasure in men’s and women’s stories about love and also among adolescent girls and young boys, I came to the places where this voice drops off and a tragic story takes over. The tragic story where love leads to loss and pleasure is associated with death was repeated over and over again, in operas, folk songs, the blues, and novels. We were in love with a tragic story of love. It was “our story.” If we have a map showing where pleasure is buried and where the seeds of tragedy are planted, then we can see an order of living that was presumed to be natural or inevitable as a road we have taken and trace alternative routes. Piecing together an ancient love story with the findings of contemporary research, I found myself led into the heart of a mystery and then to a new mapping of love. This book is a record of that journey. In the mid-1980s, I began a study with