I’m reading Carol Gilligan’s brilliant book, “In a Human Voice.” It’s been 40 years since her landmark tome, “In a Different Voice,” the book that swept the nation and became the core curriculum for almost every women’s studies program on college campuses.
But this one includes all of us. She uses the phrase “moral injury.” And for many pages, I didn’t know what she meant. Until she talked about the Vietnam veterans coming home and trying to sort out what they had done. So many of them were trying to make sense of the contradiction of knowing in their guts that what they had been doing was wrong, but their superiors and the culture were telling them not only was it right, but it was heroic. And that’s when I got it. What I had often called “soul murder,” she was calling moral injury. Stuff so big you couldn’t integrate it into your heart, so you had to keep it compartmentalized in a special corner of your brain. Which we all know is crazy-making. How do you keep that emotional contradiction locked up? What do you do when the stuff starts leaking out into your everyday life? It explains so much of the tragedy of that whole era, and maybe much of the anxiety that’s so prevalent today.
When I was little, when my father was angry, he would yell, “Who do you think you are?” I couldn’t have articulated it then, but I bet I was thinking, I guess who I am isn’t working for you, so who do you want me to be? For people who haven’t figured out how to integrate how they feel and what they say, it must feel like schizophrenia without the diagnosis. The roles are still so polarized. The other night, cooler than usual, at an outdoor restaurant, one of our grandsons looked cold. He was wearing only a T shirt and shorts, and when I said, “Do you want a sweatshirt?” his older brother said, “Be a man, you can take it.” I almost fell off my seat. All these years, and all these books and all these songs, and all the courses on gender studies, how could a boy in 2024 say such a thing? Gilligan talks about what happens to girls and what happens to boys when they confront this conflict of heart versus reason, feelings versus facts. The pressure for boys to shut down their tenderness (since feelings are girlie) and the silencing of girls’ voices (since no one is listening) exact a huge psychological and political cost for society. And we sure are paying the price right now. There is so much disconnect and lack of empathy in our society.
In the ’70s, I taught at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. It was the second year girls were admitted. The class was called “The Personal Essay.” One of the assignments was, “I should have known,” and the boys came in with these dissertations and almost journalistic reports about the Bay of Pigs, or the stock market crash of ’29, and the girls wrote, well, personal essays. The boys didn’t have the language to say, “I felt,” or “I wondered,” or “I was terrified realizing …” However, when I called on them, they projected with so much confidence and clarity. But when I called on the girls, they looked down at their papers and barely audibly said things like, “I don’t think I did this right?” “I’m not sure I can read this out loud?” Do you see the question mark at the end of those statements, in hesitant, fragile voices? Can you hear the upspeak? The whole thing was killing me. Here were the guys, loud and clear, writing not from their hearts but from their linear brains, and here were these emotional girls, still unsure that their thoughts meant anything. I did something that probably would get me fired today. I did an imitation of how different the two sets of voices sounded. And then I said to my beautiful, insightful, wise, and heart-driven young women, “Here’s what I want you to do when I call on you. I want you to think in your mind the following [and now I was yelling]: ‘These people are so f______ lucky to hear my work!’ and then read loud and proud.” By mid-semester, the girls were standing up (one girl actually stood up on her seat) reading, almost shouting. Their essays began to come from a place of power, and also told from the way they felt. And the boys caught on to what was missing from their stories, and started taking the chance of crossing the old corpus callosum and weaving some feelings into their writing. It blows my mind and breaks my heart that in this day and age a boy (in my own family) would think vulnerability had a gender. That if you’re cold, putting on a sweater would show weakness. Carol, hurry, you might have to write another book!
