I first encountered Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice somewhat late in life, as a master’s student in counseling psychology in my mid-forties. The book was published in 1982, but I didn’t read it until the fall of 2014, making me about 32 years late to the party. I’d encountered mentions of the book often enough, but had somehow been given to understand that it was “OK, but overhyped”–old hat by a feminist of the bygone variety: unoriginal, lacking in rigor, and problematically essentialist in its claims about gender.

It wasn’t until I actually sat down to read the book myself that I realized what arrant nonsense that all was. In a Different Voice not only turned out to be a deeply profound, deeply satisfying, deeply inspiring book to read, but turned out not to be saying half of what I had been told it said. It’s true of some events that you had to be there to understand them, but it’s true of all books that you have to read them to comprehend them. 

What I’d been led to believe was that In a Different Voice argued that men and women have intrinsically different thinking styles. It does not argue that. It argues that men and women have in some respects come to have different thinking styles, not because they’re intrinsically wired to think in any particular way, but because they’ve been inculcated or indoctrinated into adopting the style they’ve come to have.

The achievement of the book has less to do with any claim about gender than about identifying and differentiating distinct styles of moral thought. Some of these styles, Gilligan argues, are reflexively thought “feminine,” and in fact  adopted more often by women than by men. The reverse is true of others. Given this, contingently-feminine-identified styles of thought have often been regarded as inferior to contingently-male ones. But–and this is the whole point of the book–they are neither intrinsically feminine nor inferior. They’re just autonomous styles of thought with distinct strengths and weaknesses of their own. 

I thought of all this as I’ve immersed myself recently in migrant defense work. It seems a preposterous thing to say at first. What does migrant defense work have to do with In a Different Voice or vice versa? Well, In a Different Voice had identified and valorized what has come to be called an ethic of care, as contrasted with the abstract conception of justice epitomized by traditionally androcentric thinkers influenced by Kant.  For thinkers of this latter sort, the motherly realm of care and nurture was, though warm and fuzzy, still only proto-ethical–ethical in a primitive, merely emotional, and therefore defective way. It was Gilligan’s great insight to contest this shallow and complacent assumption. The realm of care was an autonomous moral realm of its own, with its own dignity and norms.

One thing that strikes me as I do migrant defense work is the disproportionate number of women in the movement. I don’t mean to slight the efforts of men, who are obviously important and obviously there. I mean to be making a somewhat local observation. In places like Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, the struggle against ICE has been overt, angry, and occasionally violent. In New Jersey, by contrast, things have taken a different form. New Jersey is both a highly segregated and highly industrial place. What that ends up meaning is that its industrial zones are segregated from its treesy, suburban or semi-rural spaces. In this respect, the political geography of the state is well suited to ICE’s purposes. ICE doesn’t need to mount conspicuous, militarized raids in the Jersey suburbs (where most of its residents live) to do what it wants to get done. It can just go to where the warehouses or factories are. That’s where most of the migrants are, as well, sitting ducks for detention, abduction, incarceration, and deportation. 

ICE’s activities have therefore taken a subtler, more discreet form in New Jersey, invisible to most. You can live in a quaint town like Cranbury or Princeton or Montgomery, and miss the fact that a mile from the quaint center of your town lies a plantation-like belt of warehouses where migrant laborers do the work that makes the quaintness of your life possible. What happens in that belt stays in that belt, except for the detained and abducted migrants themselves. The undiscerned go undiscerned by the undiscerning. Blindness is the darkness that hides every misdeed. 

Who ends up noticing the effects? Not the captains of industry in their gleaming office buildings, or for that matter, the ones working remotely from their McMansions in Millburn or Monroe. The people who see ICE’s depredations most vividly are the people in caretaking roles–nurses, teachers, social workers, baby sitters, and moms. Also occasionally the managers or owners of small-scale businesses inclined to treat their employees as extended family–delis, cafes, yoga studios, nail and hair salons.  

As it happens, these people often tend to be women. They spend their lives caring for and nurturing the people ICE singles out for attack. Put another way, they spend their lives trying to stitch together the human bonds that ICE spends its time ripping apart. It’s no surprise, then, that you hear these womens’ outrage when they speak about what they see of ICE’s endeavors. Think of it as Gilligan’s Revenge. The women Gilligan valorized in her book are finally coming to have their say, speaking truth to power–and often enough, being heard. What they’re demanding is the freedom to exercise empathy on the chosen objects of their care without coercive interference into those relations: an invocation of both freedom and empathy against coercion without seeing a contradiction between those commitments. Their voices are the soundtrack of a moral revolution, one that’s been a long time in coming. 

The photos in this post appear at first not to have anything to do with the post. They’re all from my trip this evening to New Brunswick to speak at the Middlesex County Commissioners meeting in defense of the Immigrant Trust Act–a construction site, a Mexican restaurant, the Mexican flag hanging outside the Mexican consulate. But they are, to me, human reminders of what the struggle against ICE is all about, the particular people and relationships that exemplify the abstract principles in need of defense, and the policies in need of change.

Downtown New Brunswick often seems like one big construction site, fodder for many promises from the powers-that-be, and of much anticipatory bragging as well. Who built it? In large part, migrant labor. Take migrant labor out of construction, and nothing gets built.

Migrant laborers have to eat. Where do they eat? At little places like La Vecindad on Spring Street, run by two women, maybe sisters or cousins, who work to suppress their surprise at my presence–a guy whose choppy, ill-fashioned Spanish marks him out as a gringo, albeit a dark-skinned one. La Vecindad is a Mexican restaurant in the way that a dhaba is an Indian restaurant: technically true, but really meant for natives, not gringos, and minus any accommodations for gringo sensibilities. So we speak Spanish rather than English in our conversations at La Vecindad, however ill-fashioned on my end, and as usual I find myself regretting that certain nouns and certain verb conjugations never seem to stick in my mind as they should. 

“El negocio puede ser pequeño, pero la vision tiene ser grande”: the business may be small, but its vision should be big. The biggest thing in La Vecindad is the nervous warmth of the proprietors, who fuss over me in Spanish, asking whether I like the food, asking whether I want more, asking if everything is all right, making chit-chat, tolerating my less-than-fluent replies, but spending most of their time off-stage, cooking, cleaning, and cooking some more.  There’s something touchingly homey about this place, which is why I habitually eat here whenever I’m in town. It’s not my home, but it’s recognizably someone’s home, and it causes me pain to think that ICE exists to wreck these homes, and wreck the lives of those who make them. “No permitas que gente enojada con su vida te robe la paz y la alegría”: don’t let people who hate their own lives rob you of your peace and happiness. It seems more like aspiration than advice, but either way  something to take under advisement.

The Mexican flag flies in front of the Mexican consulate, but doesn’t really mean anything to me, good or bad. I’m not a Mexican nationalist, have never been to Mexico, and don’t even celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Chips, salsa, and pico de gallo are about as close as I usually get to Mexico. Still, it somehow cheers me to see a Mexican flag staking out a bit of foreign territory in the heart of Jersey. No wall separates me from this bit of Mexican territory, just an ordinary glass door. If only it was that way south of the Rio Grande.  But it isn’t.

“The very traits that traditionally have defined the ‘goodness’ of women,” Gilligan wrote, “their care for and sensitivity to the needs of others, are those that mark them as deficient in moral development” (In a Different Voice, p. 18). That remains true today, and explains a great deal about our “national conversation”–national cacophony–over immigration. One side demands adherence to “the law,” regardless of the human cost. The other side recognizes that American immigration law is partly a nullity and partly a fraud, and that we are, in consequence, thrown on our own moral resources for deciding how to proceed. Subtract empathy from those resources, and you’re practically left without resources at all. 

It’s remarkable how little the members of the first group have learned from Carol Gilligan and the ethic of care, and perhaps unremarkable that their view of their world is so insistently androcentric and misogynistic. It’s not just that they hate women but that they hate what women are thought to represent: care for and sensitivity to the needs of others. Empathy is the radix malorum in the fascist Inferno. It just happens to be the “vice” that makes human life possible and worth living.  In this, as in so many other respects, Gilligan has won the day. By contrast if by nothing else, the hyper-masculinists of the present have proven the point that the “old, bygone feminist” was trying to make.  No matter how loudly they yell, her voice is one they’ll never drown out.