Chapter 5 Resisting Injustice: A Feminist Ethic of Care

Even in Totalitarian societies that target the psyche for attack, there are always some people who see through the lies and speak truth to power. We think of them as heroic, which they are. Yet listening to women who took great risks under the Nazis--Magda Trocmé, the pastor's wife in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who responded when Jews knocked at her door by saying "Come in"; Antonina Zabinska, the zookeeper's wife in occupied Warsaw, who hid Jews in the zoo in the center of the city--what they say, when asked how they came to do this, is that they are human. They did what any person would have done.

I am haunted by these women, their refusal of exceptionality. When asked how they did asked what they , they say they were human, no more no less. What if we take them at their word? Then, rather than asking how do we gain the capacity to care, how do we develop a capacity for mutual understanding, how do we learn to take the point of view of the other or overcome the pursuit of self-interest, they prompt us to ask instead: how do we lose the capacity to care, what inhibits our ability to empathize with others, and most painfully, how do we lose the capacity to love? It is the absence of care or the failure to care that calls for explanations.

I am haunted too by the Christmas truce of 1914, a "human eisode amid all the atrocities which have stained the memories of war," as Arthur Conan Doyle described it. In the fifth month of a fifty-two-month war, on Christmas Eve, British and German soldiers spontaneously stopped fighting. At the sight fo candles on small trees strung along the German trenches and the sound of Christmas carols wafting back and forth across No Man's Land, the overlay of war dissolved. For twenty-four hours, soldiers exchange small gifts- -one Brit who loved buttons wrote home that a German had cut two buttons off his coat for him. They retrieved their dead; a soccer ball was kicked around. No man's land became everyman's land. This was not a myth, the BBC reminds us; it "really happened."

And so did the bullying stop, at least to a significant extent, when babies were brought into classrooms. A Canadian educator, Mary Gordon, had the idea and started the "Roots of Empathy" program in Toronto. Each month during the school year, three forty-minute visits were scheduled: a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post visit, led by a trained instructor. From kindergarten through seventh grade, a mother came with her baby (between two and four months at the beginning of the school year). David Bornstein reports:

        During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother
        (sometimes it's a father) on a green blanket (which represents new
        life and nature) and they try to understand the baby's feelings. The
        instructor helps by labeling them. "It's a launch pad for them to
        understand their own feelings and the feelings of others," explains
        Gordon. "It carries over to the rest of the class.

Observing these sessions, Bornstein was struck by "how the baby actually changes the children's behavior. Teachers have confirmed my impressions: tough kids smile, disruptive kids focus, shy kids open up. In a seventh grade class, I found 12-year-olds unabashedly singing nursery rhymes." The baby acts "like a heart-softening magnet," drawing to itself human qualities that seemingly had hardened.

Carol Gilligan "Joining the Resistance" (2011) pp. 164-165