Harvard Educational Review Vol. 94 No. 1 Spring 2024 Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Asking an Unasked Question and the Radical Act of Listening: A Story About Relationships DEBORAH L. TOLMAN Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York The summer after college, I read In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, in which Carol Gilligan (1982) feshed out her 1977 Harvard Educational Review article, answering her question, “What don’t we know because of all-male samples and virtually exclusively male researchers and theorists?” Carol’s resulting study on how women make choices about abortion launched a disruption in the feld of psychology: listening to women upended a moral order, the hierarchy of justice over care and justice logic as more developed than an ethic of care (Gilligan, 1977, 1982). Women speaking their transgressive thoughts and feelings interrupted the deeply grooved, nor- malizing, and pathologizing story of development as a climb to individuation and separation, revealing that relationships and care are fundamental to well- being and make up the moral map of the human condition. Carol contended that when women’s voices are taken seriously, we really do hear a different voice. Listening to the dynamic of the psyche—social norms and expectations embedded in the body, relationships, the social and cultural outer worlds (Gilligan et al., 1990) that kept women’s knowledge out of range—was the way in. This practice of radical listening—listening at and for the root—changed everything. In this essay I write about some less obvious ways that Carol’s work, and working with Carol, set me on a path within and beyond the ivory tower and its hallowed halls. I begin with a kind of Foucauldian archaeology, telling an untold, layered story about my years at the Harvard Graduate School of Educa- tion (HGSE), tracing the centering relationships in my experience with Carol and the Harvard Project on the Psychology of Women and the Development of Girls as the root of my research and practice. Articulating and situating the layers of that experience in time emphasizes the importance of space and 112