The most commonly cited Gilligan reference is her first major book --
Carol Gilligan. In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's
Development. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1982
But I read her initial paper, "In a Different Voice: Women's Conceptions
of Self and of Morality", which seems to have been published in a compendium
of articles about "The Naming of Difference" (I'm still searching
for the precise reference...don't you just love it when someone xeroxes
an article without writing down the source?) and it was apparent that her
main points were that, a)> conventional male researchers such as Kohlberg
were constantly extrapolating data derived from male subjects to apply the
results to females, were always running with unquestioned gendered assumptions
about the meaning of any differences that were observed, etc., and that
this constitutes bad research (and, of course, is sexist and often acts
to harm women); and b)> in the specific case of moral cognition, it was
entirely reasonable and possible to derive a different set of conclusions
about young women's moral development if one ceased to do as Kohlberg had
done.
I feel that to an extent the favorable response given to her research led
her to stress the "different voice" model she had developed as
a new "fact" about women rather than an example, and to marginalize
her original focus, which was to take on the pattern of male bias in research.
Then, later, Gilligan was maligned regarding the methodology and the questionable
nature of her demonstration of the "different voice" pattern,
but in light of the origins of her work I think this is unfair to her; I
think the "different voice" thesis was originally mainly an example
useful to make her larger point, which people missed. Perhaps it is true
that she embraced the attention and favor and that therefore she is partly
accountable for the shift in attention, but in general I don't feel her
credentials as a researcher deserved the trashing she got from certain quarters.