Hi, my name is Ruby, and I'm Dr. Jennifer Finlays and Fife's assistant, and you're listening to the Dr Finlays and

Fife podcast Archive. The podcast you'll be listening to today is called Developing Selfhood.

This episode was originally produced and published by Christy Crow Hughes.

Welcome and we hope you enjoy the episode.

Okay, so just before we begin, I wanted to give kind of a backdrop to our conversation

because we're going to be talking about developing self-hood and Carol Gilligan she's a stage theorist on moral

development

She has written a lot on this topic and so I just kind of wanted to give a brief

introduction on who she is and her theories and maybe how we'll kind of bring that all

together tonight. So Gilligan is a feminist researcher and theorist who is

colleagues with two of the most well-known

moral development theorists of the 20th century, Erikson and Koeberg. Now working alongside

these men she observed that most women were labeled inferior

in their moral development according to this Kolberg model. Now that shouldn't

have been too much of a surprise since the subjects that were being studied were

primarily white men and boys.

So Gilligan began conducting experiments of her own and developed a theory that women have a different

developmental stage process which she categorized into three stages.

So first, women begin life in a pre-conventional stage where they center on the need to survive,

and this makes them selfish. From there they transition into a

conventional stage where they orient themselves in relation to their

responsibility to others and this stage is identified primarily as a selfless stage, which is also defined by being good.

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