Gender and the development of a sense of justice: a Northern perspective

Carolyn Merchant's influential book The Death of Nature. Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, originally appeared in 1980. Two years later, another very influential book on gender, justice and care was published. Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice started a discussion about the difference between a primarily male ethic of justice and a primarily female morality of care. The morality of care was understood to rest on the understanding of relationships primarily towards concrete persons with whom we have special and valuable relationships. Gilligan quoted Freud, who concluded that women ‘show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, [and] that they are more often influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility’. She also quoted Jean Piaget, who considered that the legal sense was essential to moral development, and who viewed that this sense ‘is far less developed in little girls than in boys’.

Merchant does not mention Gilligan in her later book from 1989 on Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England.