It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex...It is the masculine values that prevail.
So wrote the novelist Virginia Woolf in 1929. In societies where male standards are considered normative, those female values have been viewed not only as secondary but also as somehow defective: based on emotion rather than reason, intuition rather than logic; ultimately incapable -- as Sigmund Freud suggested -- of shaping ethical judgments.
Times, happily, change. Today the interior lives of women are being intensely scrutinized by a band of educators and ethicists,...