Inferior, superior or just different? A woman's sense of justice in Carmen de Burgos's El abogado

It has been a common philosophical contention that women have an inferior sense of justice. Women were considered naturally incapable of developing a sense of justice, since they would always put private life before the public good. It has only been as recently as 1982 that Carol Gilligan offered a rebuttal of centuries of 'knowledge' about women's sense of justice. In her ground-breaking book, In a Different Voice, Gilligan supplies empirical evidence to suggest that women's moral reasoning is not inferior but simply different from men's. Using Gilligan's theory as my theoretical framework, in this article I will examine how her opposing concepts of the ethic of care versus the ethic of rights manifest themselves in Carmen de Burgos's novella El abogado (1915), in which a single mother sues the father for alimony of her child. I will argue that while the heroine's moral behaviour is obviously superior to that of her ex-lover, as well as that of her lawyer, her moral reasoning, in the decision-making process of how to fight for maintenance for her child, is clearly that of a 'different voice', a striving for care-based, instead of rights-based, justice.