Making connections

"In 1981, with the support of the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation, Emma Willard School undertook a groundbreaking study of adolescent female moral development in conjunction with Harvard psychologists Carol Gilligan and Nona Lyons. In addition to mapping new territory in the field of moral psychology, the Dodge Study was the first collaboration between a school and a team of scholars to pursue such research. The essays that grew out of the Dodge Study and appear in this volume represent, in Carol Gilligan's words, 'a series of exercises en route to a new psychology of adolescence and women.' As she also writes in the book's prologue, 'The observant twelve-year-old girl knows something that the adult woman has forgotten. As the river of a girl's life flows into the sea of Western culture, she is in danger of drowning or disappearing.' The Dodge Study begins to reveal the process in which that twelve-year-old changes into an adult woman."--Book jacket.