Explores the personal and political implications of Gilligan's account of pleasure and the human psyche.

With the publication of In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan made the altogether obvious but nonetheless controversial claim that a psychology of male development could not suffice as a psychology of human development. Since the publication of that revolutionary book, Gilligan has been recognized as a pioneer of feminist thought, but often vilified as an essentialist and a proponent of difference. A quarter of a century later, with the publication of The Birth of Pleasure, Gilligan offered an interpretation of human psychology, arguing through field research, through literature, and through personal and political histories that the pleasure of love is a common human denominator and that inhibiting pleasure is a price that men and women pay equally for socialization in a hierarchical culture.