Morality in Women

Feminist ethics has its roots in 18th- and 19th-century debates about the nature and function of women's morality. Thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, Catherine Beecher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton posed questions such as the following: Are women's feminine traits produced biologically and/or socially? Is there a nonbiased standard available to distinguish “good” feminine traits from “bad” ones? Is women's morality different from men's, and, if it is, why? Is ethics gender neutral or gender specific? Should women and men be held accountable to the same set of moral rules or to different ones?

Gilligan criticized her university mentor, educational psychologist and moralist Lawrence Kohlberg, for devising a scale of moral development that presented men's morality in more favorable terms than women's (Gilligan, 85).

Significantly, Noddings does not describe moral development as the process of replacing natural caring with ethical caring. As she sees it, our oughts build on our wants. Moreover, morality is not about serving others' interests through the process of disserving one's own interests. Rather, morality is about serving one's own and others' interests simultaneously. Supposedly, when we engage in ethical caring, we are not denying, negating, or renouncing ourselves to affirm, posit, or accept others (Held, 11).

Rather, we are acting to fulfill our need to be related to other people. As intuitively appealing as an ethics of care may be, it is in many ways an underdeveloped ethics subject to a variety of misunderstandings. In fact, the concept of care is susceptible to misinterpretation and may become a disempowering trap for women (Noddings, 49). More often than not, society has viewed women as bearing primary responsibility for the care of the young, the old, and the infirm. It has expected women to be the ones to sacrifice their careers and interests to serve family members' and friends' needs. Continuing to associate women with caring, as Gilligan and Noddings do, might have the effect of reinforcing the idea that because women can care and have cared so well for others, they should always care—regardless of the cost to themselves (Ruddick, 23).

Morality's imperatives are as different as the individual women to whom they speak in the sense that each woman must interpret morality's demands in terms of her social and historical context. Each woman is a Joan of Arc of sorts. She must decide whether the “voices” speaking to ...