In the early 1980s, soon after the publication of psychologist Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice, Lauren Slater, later to become the author of such daringly autobiographical works as Prozac Diary and Lying , was an unfocused psychology graduate student at Harvard, struggling (and failing) to write fiction. She decided to take Gilligan's lecture course in developmental psychology, a decision that changed her life. "Even in this large lecture hall, she created this sense of connection and intimate discovery," recalls Slater. "Listening to her, I could suddenly see that my difficulty wasn't that I had writer's block or no talent or a lack of motivation, but that I was disconnected from myself and my own particular voice. Fiction, for me, was all about artifice, wearing masks, putting words into made-up characters' mouths, and making up 'pretend' voices. I had spent much of my life talking in a 'pretend' voice, and I needed to say things straight, in a voice that was my very own."

This dawning revelation of a long-suppressed private self simmering below the surface is exactly what legions of women felt while reading In a Different Voice by Gilligan, which today remains among the most influential feminist works ever written, as Zeitgiest-altering in its way as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Gilligan's In a Different Voice has sold more than 750,000 copies (an astonishing feat for an academic book), and has been translated…