This is a follow-up to my blog entry about Ken Wilber’s book “The Integral Vision” where I said:

I’ve put this book on my “Changed My Life” list… which is a very short list. In fact, that list has only one other book on it: Carol Gilligan’s “In A Different Voice". And the scynchronistic-thing is that Wilber’s book mentions Gilligan’s book several times as a well-researched book that gives a new and valid view of female/male interactions. This is the only place I’ve ever read anything complimentary about Gilligan’s book.

Before I get to why Wilber’s book is on that list, I want to talk about why Gilligan’s book is on my “Changed My Life” list.

I don’t know how long ago I read “In A Different Voice", but it’s a 1994 printing of the 1993 version of the book, which I bought new, so we’ll assume I read it sometime in late 1994.

Prior to reading Gilligan’s book, I’d lived in an almost-exclusively male environment and where the environment wasn’t male, the mind-set was.

I was an only daughter (three brothers) of a mother I always considered weak (if you read this Mom, you’ve grown a lot over the years ) with no close female relatives or mentors. So I never had anybody female to look up to.

In school, I went to a very small farm-country school district, where it wasn’t cool for a girl to excel in math and science. I was the only girl in the entire high school who took the Physics class my Senior year. From there, I went to college, where 90% of the college was enginners of some sort, it didn’t even have liberal arts program, and there were 3 guys for every girl. I majored in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, where my classes were typically 10-to-1 guys to girls.

From there I went to work in various industries, mostly telecommunications and high-energy physics, where I was typically the only technical female in the department.

On top of that, I was married to a guy who (unconsciously) thought that if my opinion was different than his or if I came to a different conclusion about something, that I was purposfully trying to make him angry, because he hadn’t yet caught onto the fact that people have different world-views. (He has since caught on to this little fact. )

So… up until the moment I read Gilligan’s book, I was very well indoctrinated into the male mind-set… and thinking every minute of every day that there was something seriously wrong with me…

…because I was being told over and over again, practically every moment of the day, that I was wrong because I couldn’t see the world the way I was told I should be seeing it.

I’d be faced with a problem, I’d come up with what I thought was the best solution, and I’d get shot down because that wasn’t the right answer…. over and over and over. Except! That when things all played out in the end… I was proved right! Over and over again. Except that I still wasn’t right because it was a fluke, or it was this, or it was that.

Oh, jeez! I guess I’m still holding onto some anger here. I thought I’d worked all of this through. Anyway…

Then I picked up Gilligan’s book. I don’t even know how I heard about it, but I was several years into my spiritual quest by that time and may have just randomly picked it up off the bookstore shelf…

… and I was VALIDATED for the first time in my life!

I wasn’t broken… I was FEMALE!!

I was thinking, and decision-making, in a very typical FEMALE fashion.

I WASN’T BROKEN!!!

I was female.

It changed my life. Totally. Completely.

Which probably lead to the downfall of my marriage, because I suddenly wasn’t willing to put up with male-crap anymore. I was right and I knew it, and we were going to do things my way! Again and again, I was proven right, so there was never any reason for me to go back to the old male-mind-set, because my every-day experience clearly proved that the old way was a vastly inferior decision-making model. Was I perfect? Of course not. But I learned to trust my way of doing things and quit listening to what I was being told.

So, that’s how Gilligan’s book, “In A Different Voice", changed my life and I bless her for writing it.

I’m not broken; I’m female.